And you want us to believe that you know what you're talking about? in slashdot? really?

> *my brother found out about this the hard way

Your *wink* brother *wink wink*

yeah, right :)

From a site slashdotted on another post today:

A solution using rsync + a smart trick with hardlinks to provide changes history.
He also uses loopback filesystems to save the backup on windows servers keeping file permissions/ownership. Definetely worth taking a look:

http://ttsiodras.googlepages.com/backup.html

this sounds like a very good solution. Okay, it would still be a pain over a slow connection if you need to restore, but assuming your provider's backup can be used as a starting point, it should be fine ;)