Several days ago, I wanted to make a backup of my home directory to an external HDD connected with USB, and decided to use the "rdup" utility. "Rdup" is a set of commands to manage multiple generations of backups of a certain directory. What caught my eyes was its feature to make hard links between the generations automatically to save disk space. In order to accomplish a typical backup task, rdup's three commands should be combined appropriately. But if your backup goes to a local storage straightforward daily, a shell script 'rdup-simple' gives a shortcut to the task like: # rdup-simple /home/mine /media/BACKUPHDD/mypc/ Because rdup is provided as a package in Debian, its installation was also very simple.