Ask HN: What is your tool of choice to back up data on your GNU/Linux box?

I have a cron job that runs every hour and pings for any of several possible remote drives that may or may not be mounted. If it finds one it runs rsync to backup everything using hardlinks to the previous backup, saving space and doing partial de-duplication.

Then I mount and dismount USB hard drives at various locations on the network, swapping them in and out regularly. Every drive has a reasonably recent copy, thus getting redundancy with very little effort.

It was easy to set up, it's easy to run, it has significant redundancy, and every (*nix) machine is backed up.

This rsync wrapper: rsnapshot http://rsnapshot.org/

rsync -- It's quick and reliable. I set up scripts so I don't screw it up.

Haven't used rsync yet but it sounds like the ultimate backup tool. What language do you script it in, bash/shell or others?