Just copying the complete backup set of data over every so often misses one of the most important aspects of most backup software – incrementalism. That means you backup all the data in full once and then further backups (all copied to your USB stick, drive or wherever) are just the changes from that original. The advantage of this is that you then have a history, so if you discover that one of your files is corrupt for example you can go back several days/weeks/months/whatever to whenever it wasn’t.

With the straight-copy system you’re suggesting it’s a lottery that the file you want to restore wasn’t also corrupted/deleted/whatever in the backup you made a few days ago. Or in other words it’s only one step up from the people who think that RAID is a backup solution.

Also, backup software such as unison is a gui front for command line tools such as cp and rsync. Some people are not comfortable using the command line, so something like Unison is perfect for them.

Tim, I agree with creating a separate directory for home. I have recently started doing that when I install ubuntu, and it makes reinstalling a lot easier knowing that all of my settings will be retained. I agree that this should probably be done by default. The only issue I could foresee would be how to decide how big to make this directory (you would need to either provide a recommendation to the user based upon the free space, or have a default setting), but this would not be very difficult to fix.

I use the following command at the command line (where the actual date is substituted in place of ):
cp /home/tim/ -a –target-directory=/media/pip/Backup//

One default thing I would like to see distros do is creating a separate partition for /home during installation. This helps by separating a user’s data from the installation of the underlying OS and makes it much easier to preserve the user’s data if the user decides to reinstall or switch distros.

Moreover, I find backup solutions for a home user – who doesn’t have a server running 24/7 in his attic – overkill.
Attach a 32 of 64 Gb thumbstick, format it to the FS of your liking and copy the files over. or burn it on a DL DVD and you have 9GB+ of data available. As most of us have external devices attached to our systems with Hard Disks ranging from a ‘small’ 250Gb to 1.5 or 2TB there is no limit to the amount of data that you can safeguard without resorting to ‘backup software’