With the philosophy of keeping it simple, one approach is to simply use find and tar to find all changes since your last backup and put them into a compressed tar file. You can do daily, 7 day, or 32 day incremental backups, with a full backup weekly, monthly, or quarterly. You can create a script, perhaps called do-backup.sh in /root, as root:

#!/bin/bash DATE=$(date +%Y-%m-%d-%R | tr -d ':') DAYS=32 cd / find home etc usr/local -type f -mtime -${DAYS} \ | egrep -iv '(.bak|.mp3|cache|trash|~$)' \ | tar zcvf /root/backup-${DATE}-last-${DAYS}.tgz -T -