There are many backup solutions available for Linux, several of them in fact using rsync under the covers. However none of them quite seemed to fit my requirements (or I didn’t dig deep enough into the options).
Instead I have put together my own shell script to back up my home directory. It takes advantage of Linux filesystems’ capability to give a single file more than one name (known as hardlinking), and rsync’s –link-dest option. In essence I have a hybrid incremental/full backup system, which only takes as long to run as an incremental system.
My main inspiration comes from this page by Mike Rubel. My script is available at http://funkyhat.org/stuff/scripts/funkybackup
Update (17-05-2010): The script now writes out the date of the most recent backup to a file if the rsync process completes successfully. This means that if a backup is interrupted part way through it won’t be used as the base for linking, so my backup space won’t get bloated artificially.