title: What's a good way to backup (and maybe synchronize) your development machine?
body: <p>I make extensive use of source control for anything that relates to a project I'm working on (source, docs etc.) and I've never lost anything that way.</p>
  
  <p>However, I have had two or three crashes (spread over the last 4 years) on my development machine that forced me to reinstall my system and reconfigure my apps (eclipse, vim, Firefox, etc.). For weeks after reinstalling, I was missing one little app or another, some PHP or Python module wasn't there, stuff like that.</p>
  
  <p>While this is not fatal, it's very annoying and sucks up time. Because it seemed so rare, I didn't bother about an actual solution, but meanwhile I've developed a mindset where I just don't want stuff like that happening anymore.</p>
  
  <p>So, what are good backup solutions for a development machine? I've read <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/344281/can-anyone-recommend-a-good-backup-system-for-a-developer">this very similar question</a>, but that guy really wants something different than me.</p>
  
  <p>What I want is to have spare harddrives on the shelf and reduce my recovery time after a crash to something like an hour or less.</p>
  
  <p>Thinking about this, I figured there might also be a way to use the backup mechanism for keeping two or more dev workstations in sync, so I can continue work at a different PC anytime.</p>
  
  <hr>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT</strong>: I should've mentioned that</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>I'm running Linux</li>
  <li>I want incremental backup, so that it's cheap to do it frequently (once or twice a day)</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>RAID is good, but I'm on a laptop most of the time, no second hd in there, no E-SATA and I'm not sure about RAIDing to a USB drive: would that actually work?</p>
  
  <p>I've seen sysadmins use rsync, has anybody had any experiences with that?</p>