My poison is flexbackup

    [I] app-backup/flexbackup
         Available versions:  1.2.1-r12 ~1.2.1-r13
         Installed versions:  1.2.1-r12(05:37:21 PM 03/03/2014)
         Homepage:            http://flexbackup.sourceforge.net/
         Description:         Flexible backup script using perl

Pretty old, but some software is like that, able to be finished.

I run a couple cronjobs on it, doing full backups every Sunday and differentials against the full backup every other day of the week. The backup target is a RAID1 backed disk on a NAS.

Flexbackup produces tarballs essentially, with indexes and the usual add/remove tracking. Compression can be naturally applied. It all relies on the common Unix tools. Just yesterday I updated my 4-year-old configuration to try out new partitions and incremental backups; A minimal example config for flexbackup:

    $set{'pictures'} = "/stor/amy/pictures/";
    $compress = 'gzip';
    $compr_level = '3'; #1-9
    $device = '/srv/harry/pictures-backup/';

Associated crontab:

    30 4  1,15  *  *    /root/backup-scripts/backup-pictures-full.sh
    30 4  2-14  *  *    /root/backup-scripts/backup-pictures-incr.sh
    30 4  16-31 *  *    /root/backup-scripts/backup-pictures-incr.sh

With the scripts essentially saying,

    /usr/bin/flexbackup -set pictures -full \
      -c /root/flex-confs/pictures.conf >> /root/backup.log 2>&1

and

   /usr/bin/flexbackup -set pictures -incremental \
     -c /root/flex-confs/pictures.conf >> /root/backup.log 2>&1 

respectively. (They also contain some find(1) invocations to remove older full backups and obsolete incrementals.)