Welcome to LQ.
I like your goal.
As w/ many, if not most, things Linux there are many, perhaps too many, choices. Depending on how deep & complicated you want to get, Amanda &
rsync may be worth looking at. Check them out on Wikipedia & through
Google Linux.
As you may have guessed, there is no archive bit in Linux. However the modification time "
mtime" is tracked & available, as when you do
ls -l. Also available is the inode change time, "ctime". Do
not confuse it w/ MS' file create time.
If you want to go deeper into Linux file time stamps, start here:
Quote:
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Although touch provides options for changing two of the times—the times of last access and modification—of a file, there is actually a third one as well: the inode change time. This is often referred to as a file's ctime. The inode change time represents the time when the file's meta-information last changed. One common example of this is when the permissions of a file change. Changing the permissions doesn't access the file, so the atime doesn't change, nor does it modify the file, so the mtime doesn't change. Yet, something about the file itself has changed, and this must be noted somewhere. This is the job of the ctime field. This is necessary, so that, for example, a backup program can make a fresh copy of the file, including the new permissions value. Another operation that modifies a file's ctime without affecting the others is renaming.
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from:
13.4 touch: Change file timestamps
