I have a desktop that has some valuable personal and financial records, photos, etc. I installed a second drive formatted ext3 called 'internalbackup'. I've been using a variety of backup programs, and none have really been what I wanted. I'd like a copy of the current user's (wife's) home folder backed up in a simple way, so that someone who isn't me (the non-technical wife) could find everything important using just a file browser should that ever become necessary. Disk space is not a problem.
Using 'scheduled tasks' from the repository, I created a cron job:
rsync -a --delete ~/ /internalbackup/daily.backup &> /dev/null 2>&1
rsync -a --delete /internalbackup/daily.backup /internalbackup/weekly.backup &> /dev/null 2>&1
rsync -a --delete /internalbackup/weekly.backup /internalbackup/monthly.backup &> /dev/null 2>&1
The daily runs every morning at 0400. The weekly runs Mondays at 0200. The monthly runs the last day of the month at 0000.
Wasted time is of no consequence because it only really happens in the middle of the night.