I'm curious to know more about your "certain date" requirement - this sounds like it might be an XY problem. As for general advanced backup programs, I have two easy recommendations that are similar in featureset:

• Vorta (based on Borg)
• Kopia

The most important parts of real backup software IMO is the ability to compress your backups, version your files with rolling/pruning snapshots, and version your files efficiently with only deltas between them taking extra space. You can also encrypt your backup if you want to store it with a remote party, or run integrity checks to check for bitrot.

I'm using borg with vorta as a front-end, which seems to work quite well, with different possible backup targets

I like restic, haven’t seen it mentioned yet.

I use Linux Mint and love the automatic backup tool that's built in: timeshift

I’m pretty sure there are lots of options that work great. I personally just use rsync-but I know the command line is scary for a lot of people making the transition. There are lots of options like timeshift that basically put a gui wrapper around rsync. I’ve seen a lot of love for borg as well - maybe try one of those two.

I feel backups are personal and it’s hard to get a “just do this instruction”. You’ll probably have to pick a product, and then do some homework to see if it can do what you want. This is further complicated by the distro you use - or more specifically if your distro uses btrfs. Some people use a backup as a sort of snapshot, and btrfs is more full featured than ext in that regard.

Good luck!

Use timeshift, install it, just chose where you want the backups to be installed, preferably a second HD or SD Flash. Chose when like once a day, week at start up for instance and forget it. Then if you screw up your Linux, just start in console mode, timeshift --restore and five mins later your up and running.

If you want just your data to be copied, then Cron

Both are standard Linux programs, often already installed depending on what Linux you have

UPDATE: The specific date thing is because every 6 months i backup my nas to LTO tape so this backup is anything that isn't currently on tape just in case the NAS dies between backups.

Pika Backup. It's very easy to use, you select the directories you want to backup and the ones you want to exclude, then your job is over. Every time you ask it to backup it will add the new and changed files to the backup without deleting the old ones. This way the backups only grow with what's changed.

You can also ask Pika to schedule automatic backups, or you can ask for one manually if the USB HDD is not plugged in all the time.

I think that for your use case (backing up to an external USB drive) great option would be something based on Borg.

Vorta and Pika Backup are great graphical tools for Borg program, with the first being more advanced while the latter being simplier.

i use rdiff-backup

https://github.com/rdiff-backup/rdiff-backup

I use Kopia on both Linux and Windows.

It's really fast and has a lot of great features.

And it's FOSS

I use Syncthing to do a similar thing. I jus have Syncthing pointed to nfs mount to my Nas. Any files synced to the folder via Syncthing just end up on my Nas.

I use a service called iCloud which has both cloud storage and local backup support built into it. Not free or open source but no cloud platform fully is. It's also really cheap for students.

I use backintime, which is basically a GUI for rsync.

I use Borg to my nas, then rclone that to rsync.net. With Borg if you need the remote copy, you can interact with it directly.

You can, of course, Borg directly to rsync.net. You can also use rsync instead and let their ZFS snapshots do retention for you.