Server Backup Strategies Imaging & tarballs

[ShinZan]

So I have my new 1.07 server running and the hard drive is a 1tb SATA

in the olden days with 1.0 i would make an acronis image of the server and also keep tar balls of the home directories (which of course had the database backups as well)

I wish i had this going on a VMWare box but i don't....

So anywho i try to make my initial backup with Acronis and 1 hour later its still plunking along and doesnt look like its going to end anytime soon. So i try acronis 9, 10, 11, but not 12 since i dont have that version.

all 3 versions are either crapping out or taking forever. its the same hardware as the 1.0 server (same server actually) the only difference is a 1tb hard drive vs 250gb.

So my question to the community is: how are you guys backing up and what are the best options? For instance could i simply tarball the whole data partition and reinstall ubuntu from scratch do the apt-get for all the packages and then untar that archive back putting back /etc /var /home etc etc and then my server would essentially "be back" I'm trying to wrap my head around best practices for backing up linux and ispomega in light of acronis no longer really being an option. I can tar up and move stuff off via scp or a cron easily but taking the server offline for 2 3 4 hours plus to back it up doesn't seem like an option.

When acronis took 14 minutes to backup the whole server life was good now not so much.

Thanks for listening

David