Thanks nightflier,
I think it will be a while until I am up to the backup server thing, though I agree with the concepts you mention.
I now have simplelinuxbackup (./bkup) working correctly, I think, but not automatically as I can't figure out the crontab thing. I see dcron but it is apparently not a GUI. I don't see kcron or vcron in the gslapt packages. I am looking into that, slowly, as I still content to experiment with running simplelinuxbackup or gsrync manually. I ran ./bkup last night on my data files (Documents, foxpro and local mail) before I went to bed. It finished sometime during the night and those files are now on my 2 gig usb stick. Unlike before, when I was having file system problems, it got the files as well as the directories. Tonight, supposedly, ./bkup will just backup today's files to the same usb stick, etc through the week, until next Monday when it will write over last night's complete backup with a new complete backup and start over. I might not want to automate it as God only knows what would happen if I forgot to put the usb stick in before retiring. If this doesn't work, I will just backup once a week using gsrync, which might be better anyway. Either is one hell of a lot better than my former very time consuming practice of backing up to CDs about once every month or two.
John