[lug] network drives as backup?

[D. Stimits]

I find myself possibly in need of a cheap backup device, and options 
like tape drives are way out of my price range. One possibility that I 
find interesting are network drives, not the expensive RAID stuff, but 
simple things like the LinkSys EFG120/EFG250 or NSLU2.

I hesitate though, as I suspect there are lots of gotchas. For example, 
the specs seem to indicate that they run a windows filesystem, and 
probably require SAMBA or some such nonsense. It'd also be nice if such 
a device had the option of doing DHCP and bootp/PXE, but probably not 
many can do this. Any suggestions in this area?

I'm not wild about the idea of using CD's or DVD's as a backup medium, 
but if I did, is there a simple way to restore from these, e.g., maybe 
amanda software works with this?

I'm actually tempted to just add a removable bay hard drive in such a 
way that I could back up data but not do a real restore from it (the 
advantage of being able to plug it in to any machine and copy over).

D. Stimits, stimits AT comcast DOT net