Backup Systems

[Jonathan Ryshpan]

I want to back up a modest home system -- about 120GB storage, about
70GB currently in use onto a (brand new) external 300GB USB hard drive.
This should be done in a systematic way so that a modest number of old
(incremental ?) backups are available.  

There are a number of applications available to do this, in particular:
        amanda
        backuppc
        bacula
These are all intended for backup from a client to a server.  Is there
any reason for the client and the server not to be the same machine?  Is
this overkill -- will a little script with rsync or whatever do the job?

There's also 
        dump
but this seems to be intended mostly for backup to tape.  Is this
impression of dump correct?

Thanks - jon