Seeking Wisdom Concerning Backups

I have a small server on which I need to backup the /home partition.

I have a Barracuda Terastation Pro backup server sitting right next to it, connected via Ethernet.

The problem is that the Terastation Pro only offers three connection methods: Windows Fileshare (Samba/smb/cifs), Apple Filesharing (AFS), and FTP).

I came into the Linux world about the time that FTP was being deprecated in favor of SFTP and its variants, so I have a real skittishness of using plain FTP. AFS is irrelevant for me. And Samba, whereas slightly distasteful, would be okay, except for two problems:

1. file permissions are not preserved when doing something like rsync, and
2. tarballs get truncated at an apparent 2GB limit when using tar.

I don't need anything fancy; just simple and reliable. I had put enough effort into learning tar and rsync to make them work (I thought! (is this 2GB limit when tarring over smb documented anywhere?)), but then I kept running into these show-stoppers as above. I've been very frustrated that over the past year of off-and-on "I'm going to get serious now and find a solution" I've been unable to find something simple(!!!) and reliable. (And by "simple", I mean "easy-to-comprehend in two-minutes", not "easy to implement after having mastered every command-line switch available".) So I've decided to finally give in and ask the big guns on this list.

Before I spend any more effort trying to setup/learn some other system (Bacula, Amanda, whatever), do you folks want to give me any suggestions as to the best way to proceed?

I want something:

* simple
* that will back up 10 - 40 GB of /home partition
* preferably making a full backup every week or so with incrementals every day, tossing out old fulls/incrementals as new ones are made
* that will work over SMB or FTP securely enough that I can stomach it
* that preserves directory structure/permissions
* that doesn't run into arbitrary limits like 2GB (or works around them)
* is automatic, so once set up, I don't have to think about it
* does not require X or web server installation/tweaking to configure
* does not require any sort of server piece (other than perhaps an /etc/init.d "service" installed as part of a quick and easy "aptitude install ..."
* does not require fancy back-end stuff, like MySQL

I know some of you experts see a solution immediately in using tar or rsync, and are thinking, "Well, if Kent had just done his research he'd know that if he'd XXX, then YYY...", but that's just it; I'm not a full-time researcher of how tar and rsync and Bacula works, and thus I'm throwing myself on the mercy of the community for a workable solution.

(I suspect there may be a lot of people like me who knows we need to be doing backups but can't find a 2nd-grade-easy system to accomplish the task.)

Thanks for any suggestions/help!

--
Kent


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