rsnapshot is a fantastically simple, easy-to-use application for performing backups of one computer to another. It uses rsync so that the data sent over the wire is encrypted and only that of an incremental backup. It uses hardlinks across snapshots for unchanged files, so you have full snapshots for all the backups kept, at only a fraction of the diskspace otherwise needed.

It has turned my remote backups from a pain to a simple matter of running a command every day or two and entering my password. Entering my password manually is the only deficiency I find with it. The rsnapshot docs recommend making a passphraseless ssh key for it to use, but I don’t trust that. Sometime I’ll have to look into if I can make a ssh key which’ll only allow rsnapshot to perform its rsync download, not log in or run other commands.