Ubuntu :: Good GUI-based Backup Software?

So my dad had me build this file server at his studio. His old server was a Mac running OS X with some backup software called 'Retrospect'.

He has two backup drives - two identical 2-terabyte external drives. Each week he brings in one, plugs it into the server and at a scheduled time it would start the backup. The following week he'd bring in the other drive and backup to that - swapping each week. If the drive was missing at the time of backup, Restrospect would display a message saying it needs the drive to do the backup.

Personally I don't really like the fact that he's relying on himself or someone else to plug in the drives and do the backups, but he's paranoid that a disaster could occur in which the computer gets destroyed (maybe a comet hitting his studio.).

what I'm wondering is - is there some sort of backup software out there for Linux with a GUI that can just show current backup progress (if one is occurring) and allow you to configure how the backups can occur? I can make the window pop-up automatically using cron I guess, after which it can be closed by someone in the studio.

I'm guessing maybe a front end for rsync would be good, but I haven't seen any that do anything besides letting you configure rsync. P.S. I guess I could check if the drive is there by doing a grep on blkid for whatever the backup drive's UUID is to check if it's there.