Thanks for the play-by-play, Tom. It was entertaining and educational. Everybody who wants to do anything with Linux for the first time goes through that process, so don't think of yourself any less. Actually, many people START the process but don't finish because they think it's too much work -- and they also tend to start with something simple like just installing one.
So pat yourself on the back and have one more beer than you planned on having.
For backups, I recommend
rsync. It's very fast, works over the network and with ssh. Very tweakable, too.
