This excellent post off slashdot attracted many users to post in their backup tricks, some really good ideas here including backing up samba partitions, over passwordless ssh, incremental backup trees

A colleague of mine has written a great tutorial on how to use rsync to create automatic “snapshot-style” backups. Nothing is required except for a simple script, although it is thus not necessarily suitable for data-center applications. Please try to be gentle on his server: it is the computer that he mentions in the tutorial. Perhaps try the Google cache.”