I already knew that I had reinvented the wheel when it came to writing my automated backup solution. I spent some time researching this topic, and I found a number of resources.
Of course, as soon as I posted my results on the LUNI mailing list, I got email from helpful people pointing out that there are other projects that are out there and have been tested. Way better than what I had, and much more optimized. My solution was making multiple copies of my data, resulting in multiples of gigabytes of storage, whereas some of these solutions are clever and use much less space.
So in true blog fashion, here are some links: