[ale] Need advice on home back-up solution

[Bill Hamilton]

I have a RedHat 9 GNU/Linux system with a new 80GB hard drive and 
several Windows 98SE/2000/XP machines at home in which I need to 
automatically backup user created information.  This inludes Microsoft 
office files, digital pictures (scattered throughout the hard drive), 
browser favorites and web autofill forms (RoboForm or something like 
that...my wife depends on it...I don't know).

I need a solution (probably made up of OpenSource/Free Software and 
cmd/batch/windows scripting scripts) where each of my various Microsoft 
based operating systems routinely backup user created information to an 
ftp or smb server (GNU/Linux box listed above).  I do not have a tape 
drive on each machine nor a CD Burner (however the newest upstairs Sony 
Viao does have a DVD-R/RW burner so I could weekly pull these archives 
off of the Linux server and burn to DVD as long as these archives are 
less than 4.7GB each).  I do have a spare 17GB hard drive and I was 
thinking of putting this also in the GNU/Linux box as a mirrored 
partition just in case...probably a good idea before I go too far down 
the road doing work on this fresh install of RH9.

What does the ALE crowd recommend?

At work we use Connected TLM network backup software and that seems to 
work very well.  I can open it's app and restore with ease but this kind 
of use would be icing on the cake.

Other icing or advanced needs would be:

1.  Not have to go to each machine and manually start a backup
2.  Because we don't store everything in a c:\data folder then what I 
choose should not only pick-up "My Documents", "My Pictures" "RoboForm 
Data" but also by filename or filename extension on the hard drive. 
3.  Actually be a (web based) document management system. 
4.  Notify me of duplicate files.

I'm pretty adept with winzip command line and windows batch file writing 
so I could hack out a generic series of scripts that should work on each 
machine to create and transmit zips up to the server but I would like 
for these files to be unzipped up on the GNU/Linux box.

Any suggestion welcome...

-Bill Hamilton