I looked at rsync a while back and couldn't find much for win. It looks like 
Deltacopy and Nasbackup are both based on Cygwin. Maybe good for the image 
copies, although Nasbackup isn't much on the server end for windows. Freenas 
looks good too, although I'll have to change things around a bit. It doesn't 
like any disk formatting but its own, so that will take some thought to avoid 
just throwing $$ at it and recycling some other hardware.

A couple of questions though.... The nice part about zipping to a usb drive is 
that I can take it offline, save wear and tear when off, etc, although the 
times are getting too long (I can also make better use of the A bit ;) .
What fear should I have regarding all the issues of having these backup devices 
online all the time? It doesn't protect against physical damage (fire, etc), 
and there's the wear and susceptibility to damage from the host OS or power 
supply, etc.

The other is version backup. One use is to restore everything, or a lost file, 
the other is to be able to go back and get the copy of xx from a month ago 
because someone's changed it beyond repair (or Microsoft botched an update). 
Separate incremental backups do that. How is that done using rsync?

Lastly, what would be the best way (and economical) to attach a bunch of PATA 
drives to a single machine? Preferably windows (probably 2k).

I've had Linux copy a filesystem and say all was fine and find thousands of 
files missing on a compare. I've had Linux Samba stop working under moderate 
loads. I've had XP (and 2k) just freeze, and leave disks damaged. Even locally 
attached disks can start acting 'funny'. So, I'm very paranoid and haven't yet 
found a backup I can 'set and forget'. At least with whole image copies, I can 
do a bit level compare to verify. The zip solution MAY work for putting away 
older stuff, but the compare cycle is a killer. I've used tape, in the pre-dvd 
days, and they would go bad, and I've even had dvd's, made less than a year 
earlier AND verified, go bad on parts of them. In one case, a 6 dvd backup lost 
75% of the files as unreadable - and on the same device that burned them. Less 
luck on an alternate drive. I'm having a hard time trusting anything... :(

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