One down, few more to go
Finally got around to trying Bacula, the open source backup software/system. Looks promising, after I sorted out what initially had me baffled but turned out to be an access problem. I’d set aside an entire (50GB, roughly) partition for Bacula to play with but it seemed entirely unable to find it. This morning (I’d started on this last night) I finally had a moment of clarity and realized that the storage daemon runs as a non-privileged user and didn’t have access there. One command and a few seconds later everything was working fine.
Now comes the fun of testing things like incremental backups, compression of backups, verifying and restoring backups, and of course organizing backups on remote machines, possibly even on the local Win98 machine.