Bad Apple's a real diplomat, isn't he? Bless...
One of life's lessons: Storage hates you. Hard drives hate you with a deep and dark loathing. They only appear to store your data long enough to lull you into a false sense of security so that when they do die (note when, not if), you will be typically unprepared.
What we do at work, (and also myself at home). I write this in the full knowledge that BA or anyone else competent can pull it apart and find holes in the strategy. But this is the thing - NO BACKUP STRATEGY IS FOOLPROOF
IMO, backups should be fully automated. It's no good relying on weak humans to remember. It should also be sophisticated enough to complain if something goes wrong and alert you.
And you should schedule human checking now and then to ensure all this wonderful automation is actually working. That should include restoring occasionally.
So...
We have a dedicated server that runs backuppc for the network (Smaller geographic lans use the single server per site).
Backuppc is one of those wonderful pieces of software that when you learn to love it, you don't look elsewhere. Some might think it's heavy for personal use, I don't. I back up my home desktop and two laptops to it.
It'll run various types of backup and "pull" from the remote. Windows PCs are dealt with reliably using the cygwin rsync service. (It'll do SMB too (and NFS), but Vista onwards caused a whole bunch of permission problems for me, while rsync just walks everywhere without fear). It'll keep cyclical backups and manage them.
It also backs up our servers.
And you can reinstate individual files, whole directories or whatever using the web interface on the server. Works well.
And of course we do some usb-in-a-physical-safe backups for some really important bits on top of that. Oh, and occasionally burn to DVD, although longevity of this is very suspect. I also re-use old pata and sata HDD's in a caddy for backups. Bit-rot affects everything, but IME these will last longer that DVD or CD backups which degrade at an alarming rate.
Also, we use backup-manager to backup debian servers to a local directory. This can be on the same hdd (not useful if the hdd dies, but good for accidental deletes), on another hdd on the same machine (psu might potentially fry both hdd's. In practice fairly remote chance). Might be on another server, but if it's nearby consider the building burning down.
