I have a cron script that rsync my entire home directory every day with a remote server. Since rsync doesn't remove remote files, I re-create a backup from scratch the first day of each month and store a copy of the previous one.

Using old standardized open source tools means it survives system updates without having to fix anything for years. I got my laptop stolen/lost 3 times over the past 15 years, and I have always been able to restore everything the next day on a new laptop, in the time it takes to transfer the files over the network.

I haven't given much thought, I'm sure there is a realistic scenario where this strategy would fails but I haven't found it yet.

rsync can delete remote files with --delete or --delete-after

What is missing is recovering accidentally deleted or corrupted data.