Incremental backups under FreeBSD 4.x using rsync

This report summarizes the technology I used to provide automated, incremental backups for Swinburne's Centre for Advanced Internet Architectures (CAIA). Living without a backup scheme is like not having car or home insurance. It works until the first disaster and then you wish you'd installed it. I kept putting it off because I didn't want to consume huge amounts of disk space keeping multiple, replicated copies of key directories. Then one day I stumbled across a web page by Mike Rubel discussing how the open source package 'rsync' could be leveraged to create a free, open-source mechanism for doing incremental backups under Linux. I made my own version based on his ideas and customised for the FreeBSD 4.x environment we use here at CAIA. This report is for the benefit of anyone curious enough to try and replicate our scheme.