So back when I used Windows, I had this handy backup utility that I have forgotten the name of, but basically it would copy certain the parts of the My Documents folder I cared about onto my second hard drive. I had it set to do this every night at 10:00, and what was especially nice was it only copied the actual changes between files.

I haven't been able to find anything like this in Linux (currently using Debian Unstable + GNOME). I have very limited space, so I can't do with a utility making a separate backup each day. I've found programs that will crate a .tar of certain things, but they seem to create a separate one each time I backup. I also don't know anything about scripting, so I wouldn't know how to write a script to do this myself. I also don't care if it packages everything into an archive or not, as long as it's on the other hard drive. Any ideas on what I should use?

Thanks!

can use tar for backup regardles what linux u have
this is the way i use ( tar cpjvf /foldertostorebackup/file.tar.bz2 folderneedtobackup/

1) for the whole system backup



2) for file backup i use this way
/export folder is another drive in my puters


hope this will help u, if there someone not yet point to very easy way to backup

cheers

Simple Backup and Keep are a couple options.

I would use the tar method, but the main thing I want in a backup program is automation; I want it to run every night and get the latest copy of the files that matter.

I tried using Simple Backup, but for some reason or another it didn't actually create a backup for me, just an empty folder that it should have backed stuff up into.

Looking through the Linux App Finder site (which I've never seen prior to you linking me to it - thanks!), I realized that I'm more looking for a file synchronization program, although it didn't seem that any of the ones I found could be scheduled to run at a certain time (at least the option wasn't available in the gui and I'm not yet especially console-savvy).

yes u can use as automation copy a command to a file
eg pico -w backup-nite <- add the command in
chmod 755 backup-nite

set a crond to be executed nitely or every 12 hours
please refer to crontab operation

this is simple link example of crontab operation

http://www.adminschoice.com/docs/crontab.htm

There is also this:

It's very very simple. It doesn't compress because the key feature is that you can browse in the backup. It's a full copy and then incremental backups are done using hard link (a same file won't be copied again)

If I understand you correctly you would like to have the directory tree stored on the backup drive in the same way that it exists on the primary drive. In other words you don't want to have archive files; you want a directory tree exactly like the one that you are backing up. You can do this with the tar command but it involves piping the output of one tar command into another so I don't think that it would only copy files that have changed since the last backup. Rather, this example will copy all of the files on the primary hard drive to the backup drive and it will overwrite all of the files. However, it will not delete any files on the backup drive.
I use this to copy directory trees all the time. Since I work on various flavors of Unix and Linux and I can't count on GNU tar being available on, let's say, Solaris, I use the tar utility to copy directory trees.

Or you can go ahead and use the cp command with the --update parameter.
You can make this happen automatically at a given time every day or whatever frequency that you want by putting the command in your crontab file to execute at times that you specify. You can look up cron and crontab in the man utility.
You can put the command directly into the crontab file without creating a script.

For some more information:

http://www.trickykid.org/index.php?itemid=4&catid=2
http://www.rsnapshot.org/howto/1.2/r...-HOWTO.en.html

I'm actually doing what stress_junkie suggested of putting a cp command for each directory I want into my crontab, and it seems to be working quite well. Thanks!