Simple incremental backups using Amazon S3 and Brackup

I've been using the opensource Brackup tool to backup some of my documents and photos to the cloud (Amazon S3 - which charges as little as $0.150 per GB per month). 

This should work on many platforms:

Install Brackup (implemented in Perl) using CPAN:

$ sudo perl -MCPAN -e shell

once inside the CPAN shell:

cpan> install Net::Amazon::S3
cpan> install Brackup

Now configure Brackup (".brackup.conf" on your home directory) by defining some file sources and an S3 account target:

[TARGET:s3_pers]
type = Amazon
aws_access_key_id = 1xxxxxNxxxxxFxx9xWx2
aws_secret_access_key = xxxxxxxYxRAoxuxDxrxxxxxxfxx4xxxxxxxxxdxx
keep_backups = 10

[SOURCE:documents]
path = /Users/ricardocabral/Documents
ignore = ^/books/
ignore = ^/Parallels/
ignore = ^eclipse
ignore = ^hdd
ignore = ^.svn

[SOURCE:pictures]
path = /Users/ricardocabral/Pictures
ignore = ^iPhoto
ignore = ^.svn

The commands I have on a cron job are:

brackup --from=documents --to=s3_pers -v
brackup --from=pictures --to=s3_pers -v

To restore a backup after a disaster, one can get all remote files describing "backup snapshots" with:

brackup-target s3_pers get_backups

Then choose the backup snapshot descriptor file corresponding to the point in time you want to restore and do:

brackup-restore --from=documents-1214139675.brackup --to=/target/dir --all