I too am retired. I use "rsync" instead of "tar" because I prefer the ease of browsing and restoring from a non-compressed filesystem. To save space on the ba

I too am retired. I use "rsync" instead of "tar" because I prefer the ease of browsing and restoring from a non-compressed filesystem. To save space on the backup medium and get a faster backups I use the "--link-dest" option of "rsync" to hard-link unchanged files in the destination backup to a previous backup. Since I have external drives that also need to be backed up I put a ".diskid" file containing a unique identifier in the root of each external drive and duplicate the identifier in the disk name. My backup software has multiple targets and sources configured, so all I have to do is execute "backup" and all possible backups are performed depending on whatever external drives I have mounted.