New
#11
Thank you everyone! I finally have a full image backup of my main computer.
Macrum is exactly what I was looking for. After Carbon Copy Cloner saved me on OS X, this is definitely a must have. The initial backup took a couple of hours over my 10Mbps LAN, but I will be rebuilding it and expanding my little lab.
The only thing that the free version of Macrum does not do are incremental backups, but deferential weekly and monthly images are just fine.
@jimbo45: The VM idea is great as well, I have VirtualBox installed but never actually used it as a kind of sandbox testbed. No shed with geothermal possibilities on this end, I'm jealous. :)
One very last question about the backup strategy itself. I read somewhere that we should keep three backup copies? I would be satisfied with a local one and one in the cloud. Any thoughts?