Reliable, transparent incremental backup solution

Hello,

This morning my kid came to me in tears, as she has accidentally deleted her story in Open Office Writer file, on Mint 9. (well, to be more precise, she somehow managed to overwrite the file with an empty document). The last backup was made couple of months ago, so there comes the lesson: to read the warnings of applications carefully, and to backup often.

But, I am looking for something more easy to use rather than regular manual archiving of certain folder contents. Is there an app with GUI that would keep in check all the folders that it is pointed to, monitoring for any change in any file, and registering incremental changes (to avoid huge redundant archives), so that I could restore any file to any date, when I need? I hear there is something like this on Apple, called "Time Machine", but I had no opportunity to see it in action.

Thanks for your advice!

Hello

You can take a look at some of the backup options listed here:

Backup | Linux App Finder

One or more of those are supposed to be similar to Time Machine, I think.

Back-in-time (Link) may suit your needs. You don't say which DE you are using but it comes with front ends for KDE and Gnome which runs just fine on XFCE. I transparently back up my data every hour, although you should check now and then as it can silently fail if you screw up the settings :?

It may be in your distro's repositories, although it is a simple install from the web. I don't know what Time Machine is like, but this is allegedly close although not as pretty.