digitalderbs writes:
"A perennial problem facing computer users is how to keep documents, pictures, music and other personal files synchronized between computers. Robust uni-directional solutions, like rsync, and bi-directional solutions, like unison, have existed for a long time. However, these tools require some degree of manual intervention on a periodic basis. Simplified tools like Dropbox and bittorrent sync have emerged as popular, useful and automated alternatives, but these rely on closed-source software, which could be subject to backdooring. Open source solutions, like OwnCloud, are gaining traction, but are these open source platform robust and easy enough to maintain for routine and daily use? Moreover, distributed and encrypted file systems, like Ceph, are increasingly easy to use, but many of these do not work between Linux and OS X or Windows operating systems. What are your experiences and thoughts?"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by el_oscuro on Monday March 24 2014, @11:17PM
Back in Time [ubuntugeek.com] is just a GUI interface to rsync, symbolic links and cron jobs. Directories on you backup device are named according to the date the backup was taken and unchanged files are just symbolic links to the older copy on the backup drive.
The best thing is, you don't need any special tool to restore. Just copy the files back to your hard drive as you would any other program. If your backup drive is mountable, everything on it can be restored with normal copy commands.