Backup Recipes
Copy-paste recipes for backups that can actually be restored.

Latest
Checksums first
Write the checksum file next to the archive at creation time. Verifying later against a fresh checksum proves nothing about corruption that happened before.

Rsync mirror with deletions
A mirror that follows deletions, with a dry run first.

Verifying a restore
A backup is only finished when a restore has been tried.

Rotating tarball archives
Daily archives kept for a week, weeklies for two months.