OK, deep breath, as this question is out of my league, let alone the answer :) I 'm wanting to b...

[G+_Fuzzy Wuzzy]

OK, deep breath, as this question is out of my league, let alone the answer :) I'm wanting to build a small server, possibly with a raspberry pi and two external drives, so there's a backup. This would be mainly just for keeping all my files in one place, and it'd be nice to access them from anywhere, a la owncloud, with no-ip.com as an outside free domain name. Would it make sense to do the backups with rsync in a cron job to the second hard drive, or back up with bittorrent sync to an offsite machine? 

[G+_Fuzzy Wuzzy]

Good point

[G+_Cole Brodine]

It looks like somebody has done something similar to what you are looking at doing:

 

http://www.element14.com/community/community/knode/single-board_computers/blog/2013/05/08/using-owncloud-on-raspberry-pi-to-take-back-control-of-data

 

I think doing the backups to an offsite machine would be better.  I had looked into doing encrypted rsycns across the internet before, which I believe would work, but I never actually tried it.  A quick google search indicates some people are doing Bittorrent Sync on Raspberry Pi with varying levels of success.

 

If you get this running, you should take screenshots, etc and blog about it.  I would love to see a guide from somebody!

[G+_Andre Klärner]

well - why no use both? rsync locally to a second disk, maybe one connected once a week to your desktop machine, and sync more often than daily to an offsite location. That way in the worst case you can use the local backup for restore and top it up with the remote locations changes if your local backup is nearly a week old. It might also help for setting up the remote site to have a similar backup transportable  and would cut your restore time. But make always sure to test your restore once in a while.