[znull]

http://www.dirvish.org/ and http://rsnapshot.org/ are both wrappers around rsync that do exactly this. Eventually, though, I switched to http://duplicity.nongnu.org/ for the network backends and the encryption.

[weaksauce]

How do you like duplicity? That looks like a good solution for my work backups.

[znull]

I haven't pushed it very hard. I'm only using it for personal stuff.

That said, it's pretty good at DWIM for a command-line tool. It works as advertised and doesn't require any fiddling once you have it set up.

cons: command line syntax is verbose. Enough so that there's a wrapper for it (http://duply.net/) which I also recommend. Access to backups isn't as straightforward as with forest-of-hardlinks approaches.

I'd be interested to hear how it holds up to production use.

[andrewcooke]

some of the comments about rdiff-backup (below) might also apply to duplicity, since it seems to share much of the same internals (duplicity seems to be the encrypted version of rdiff-backup).