There are many backup utilities for Linux out there to choose from.  I personally find rdiff-backup to be quite useful — I can revert to prior snapshots, which is a big plus, and it supports backing up over a network. Since it uses librsync, the bandwidth usage is quite efficient, and the incremental backups don’t take as much space as other backup programs (only the diff is stored and compressed, not the entire changed file).

Since rdiff-backup keeps increments, I can schedule backups periodically with cron, Use crontab -e to define backup scripts to run at specified times and crontab -l to verify/list the scheduled processes.

With this method, if I make mistake and delete or incorrectly modify a file, I can usually search through the backup set to find the version I want to restore with relative speed and ease using rdiff-backup (it’s saved my skin on a few occasions).