I wrote a tool called Snebu (www.snebu.com), which is intended to give you the same thing as rsync + hard links. Uses find and tar to grab file metadata and re

I wrote a tool called Snebu (www.snebu.com), which is intended to give you the same thing as rsync + hard links. Uses find and tar to grab file metadata and retrieve files, on the back end it stores file data in .lzo compressed files with all metadata for each snapshot (including symlinks, hardlinks, etc) stored in a sqlite3 DB file. The design goals were to make something that didn't store data in a proprietary format (you can analyse the backups using straight sql commands, and access the data using lzop), and to be able to back up systems without installing a client agent on them, and support compression, and avoid filesystem issues you run into with a large number of hard links (such as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8305283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8305283). So far I've been using it to back up a few dozen RHEL 4 - RHEL 7 systems over the last couple years without issues.