Having effective backups are a critical part of any business, but the open source community was for a long time ignored. It's only in recent years that we've had tools and extensions that allow backup of Linux software - I've been using the backup client for Retrospect from Dantz now part of EMC for years.

But what about open source backup tools for open, and proprietary, platforms. There have been many bubbling under, although I doubt I will be the only to admit having used tar, cpio or rsync for years on their Unix systems. In fact, I've been using a variation of the same backup script now for about 12 years. Others probably use ufsdump or similar for their backups - a tool that has been part of Unix for many many years, but it is hardly an effective solution for very large systems.