"Last week, I told you about my NAS purchase, and my desire to explore desktop applications for backing up your Ubuntu computer. From the administrative interface of my Buffalo NAS, I created a network share that I could access with the different systems in my office. It's an SMB share so that it can also be accessed from Windows if needs arise. I then permanently mount those shares as network file systems (though not NFS) on my Kubuntu Karmic system. This I do from the command line
In general terms, DeltaCopy is an open source, fast incremental backup program. Let's say you have to backup one file that is 500 MB every night. A normal file copy would copy the entire file even if a few bytes have changed. DeltaCopy, on the other hand, would only copy the part of file that has actually been modified. This reduces the data transfer to just a small fraction of 500 MB saving time and network bandwidth. In technical terms, DeltaCopy is a "Windows Friendly" wrapper around the Rsync program, currently maintained by Wayne Davison. "rsync" is primarily designed for Unix/Linux/BSD systems. Although ports are available for Windows, they typically require downloading Cygwin libraries and manual configuration.
VirtualBox is a family of powerful x86 virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). See "About VirtualBox" for an introduction.