[JoeD]

I use CrashPlan, it's free for personal usage (unless you want to backup to their cloud, in which case there's a small charge). You set it up once and then can basically forget about it.

Multiple ways for it to backup:
*) To their cloud (payable service)
*) To an external hdd (free)
*) To another computer (free)
*) To an external hdd on another computer (free)
*) To a friends/family members remote computer (free)

It's quite handy if you want to do a backup between yourself and a family member since you get a remote backup at the same time and it's dead easy to configure. I backup all our PCs (win/lin and mac) to a an external hdd that's attached to a single computer that's on most of the time.

The pricing on the family plan version of crashplan+ which is their cloud based backup is quite reasonable, but I'm not keen on putting all my data in the cloud.

Other than initial setup, I spend 0 time each day doing anything backup related. I've restored 2 PCs worth of data fully after HDD failures and used it several times to restore a few files I deleted by mistake.

One extra nice part of crashplan is you don't have to backup to just a single destination, you can get redundancy by backing up to multiple places like a friend + external hdd and/or swap out the external hdd every few months so you have an offline backup that's a little out of date + your connected backup that's up to date.

The only part I'm not keen on is their versioning. It will keep (diff'd) copies of your files at various versioning cut off points, eg one different copy for the last 7 days, then one for each week for 4 weeks followed by one copy for each month. Doesn't really take up much space since it's differences only, but there's no option to wipe all but the most up to date versions other than deleting the backup data and letting it re-backup or removing that file from the backup, then adding it again.

That's a bit of a pain when you're only interested in versioning for say 1 year back at most and would like changes to disappear after that to reclaim some space.

FWIW: For many years I used RSync and later RSnapshot for backups, but I've found crashplan covers the same backup efficiency but provides additional features beyond it, but if they ever start charging for the free version I'll likely return to RSnapshot.

That's mainly because I don't really want to use the cloud part so the value is a little less to me. If they offered a paid version with the same features as crashplan+ but without the cloud bit (and included the versioning clean I mentioned above) I'd likely buy a license for several computers instead of going back to rsync.