

rsnapshot is a script for the purpose of repeatedly creating deduplicated copies (hardlinks) for one or more directories. You can chose how many hourly, daily, weekly,… copies you’d like to keep and it removes outdated copies automatically. It wraps rsync and ssh (public key auth) which need to be configured before.
You can never be sure. Regressions do happen.
First evaluate it on your test setup.
— useless hint of the day
Some fs can do snapshotting (btrfs, zfs,…). Second best would be a current backup to restore from.