Hi everyone, and thanks for all the great information in this forum. I've been learning a ton just reading old threads.

I'm pretty new to Linux but decided to go with a 12.04 server edition on my old PC hoping to use it to accomplish a few tasks around the house and improve my CLI skills.

One of the things I'm thinking of using it for is as a Time Machine backup destination for my Macbook Pro and possibly my girlfriend's as well. I have netatalk running fine and I think this should work out well.

However, I'd also like to have a backup of the Ubuntu box itself. One of the things I was considering would be a (software) RAID 1 setup, which seems like it would work great. However, I'd want to exclude the Time Machine directory, because it seems like it would be a waste of space to RAID 1 a backup (meaning I'd have a triplicate copy of that data).

Instead of a RAID setup, I was also thinking I could probably do something with rsync, which would facilitate excluding that Time Machine directory, but I'm not sure if the result would be bootable. I'd just hate to lose all the time that goes into the details and config files if anything were to happen.

The other concern would be encryption. I have home directory encryption enabled with ecryptfs, but I'm not sure if the rsync backup would play nice with that (especially depending on whether or not I was logged in and therefore the home directory decrypted).

Do any of you have suggestions on my best bet for a bootable backup that could exclude a particular directory and would also work well with home directory encryption?

Many thanks.