The comment about using them regularly was mostly targeted at rsync, tar, and other backup tools. I never invested the effort to automate my backups even though I am well aware of cron.

Part of the problem is that the manual part of connecting the backup hard drive remains. I don't like online backups since I don't have sufficient bandwidth. So what I was really looking for was a nicely scripted backup solution that integrates with udev, so that I really only have to plug in my hard drive. And figuring out udev -- which tends to change from version to version -- is something that I thought I'd do "later."