Need for easy and reliable backup tools on Linux

"You are saying 'Linux doesn't have an integrated backup tool', but there are hundreds of
Linux distributions, of which perhaps ten have a big share of the market.  If you look at
these distros, many of them do have integrated backup tools - certainly Kubuntu, Puppy and
Damn Small Linux all do.  "

Really? where? Is it automatic? Does it require user interaction? Does it back up everything?
I HAVE seen some Ubuntu-tools that lets the user burn the home-directory to CD or something,
but that is NOT what we are talking about here.

"Of course they may not be as slick as Apple's Time Machine, but they don't need to be"

Why not? "slickness" is a positive value in just about everything, why should those tools be
"slick"? Should we just accept the fact that "Mac is smooth and slick, Linux is clumsy and
utilitarian"? Why?

I noticed this difference last week in a concrete way. I was testing KDE 4 with a Live-CD on
my MacBook Pro. As I was running it, my wife happened to walk by. The following discussion
took place:

Wife: "That's not MacOS, that's Linux"
Me: "How do you know?"
Wife: "Well, it just looks a bit clumsy and awkward, while Mac looks chic and polished".

Why should it be like that? That "chicness" and "polish" in Mac comes from all those things
that you think is unneeded. And that includes that slick data-restore view in Time Machine. If
we just stick to "utilitarian" UI's, Linux will always look "clumsy and awkward" when compared
to OS X.

Take a look at something like Delicious Library. There might be similar apps for Linux. But I
bet that they have nowhere near the polish as DL does. And while some might say that that
polish is useless, it makes the whole app very pleasant to use. 

"Most of Time Machine's slickness is about the restore user interface, which is hardly a major
requirement, since restore is a fairly infrequent operation, as long as it's reasonably easy -
people are usually highly motivated to restore!"

But why shouldn't the process be made as nice as possible? When user finds that he has lost
some files, he's nervous and anxious. making the restore pleasant and smooth is a very
positive quality.

That's one of the differences I have noticed between Linux and Macs (and Windows and Mac as
well): Mac-developers tend to make the software smooth and slick even when there's no obvious
benefit for that slickness. But even if the benefit is not obvious, it makes the whole
experience of using that software very pleasant and soothing.

You might say that Time Machine's restore-process is useless eyecandy, since presenting the
user with a simple list of files achieves the same goal. But that's just it. One is slick and
polished, the other is "utilitarian".

I maintain that software that is pretty and "slick" is better than software that is
utilitarian, everything else being equal.

"Simply letting people navigate the backup data store interactively via a Konqueror/Explorer
type tree view, or a Gnome file manager view, is fine."

Sure, that might get the job done. But the whole process is less pleasant. It's "utilitarian".
Would you rather have slick and smooth process, or "utilitarian" process? And note: the "slick
and smooth" does not have to mean that it's less powerful or somehow worse process. Why should
the apps and OS we use be gorgerous, slick and smooth? Why should we just stick to software
that presents us a "utilitarian" UI that just gets the job done? Why shouldn't we have
software that looks and feels gorgerous and slick, while getting the job done? Is "looking
ugly" some kind of positive value these days?

"Having an unreliable backup tool is worse than not using a backup tool - you can't tell when
an unreliable tool will fail, yet you think you have valid backups"

But if you have no backups, you have no backups. Even with unreliable backup (and I haven't
heard about that many issues regarding TM, other that the restore-process is a bit slow) you
at least have the hope that you have a backup.