Yet another one is http://www.rsnapshot.org/ there have been a fair number of these created over the years.
rdiff-backup uses reverse diffs for its incremental backups, not hard links. This has the nice advantage of when large files change, the backup size changes only by the diff, not a whole new version of the file.
or rsync into zfs filesystem with snapshots.
or rsync into (optionally LUKS-encrypted) btrfs filesystem with snapshots.