I used to do something
like that, not exactly though, a while back when I was working at one place where they needed a certain backup-system. Well I had a lot of other work to do so I only managed to create a brutal beginning for them, and in the end another person took the job to continue. I myself just wrapped certain Linux tools in a script that eventually did the backup pseudo-automatically, but it really wasn't a shining nice one. I used cdrecord (DVDs didn't belong to that project), cpio and such normal tools and wrote the script/interface myself..well at least it was a working one, if not the most user-friendly, and I hope my follower had time to turn it into a better one or did a better one
I just think that's not what you're thinking, right? But anyway, depending on what you exactly want to do, you
could do the same; use the existing simple tools to create something bit more complex (some say this is a "Unix philosophy").
