It requires less wheel inventing as it is mostly declarative. It provides a higher level of abstraction vs rdiff-backup. Finally, it is more like Apple's Time Machine since t uses hardlinks to dr duplicate files. This means that you can browse all you backups in parallel and do not have to worry that one of the incremental backups being corrupt means that all subsequent ones are corrupt as well.

I did not evaluate bup beyond this statement in the readme:

> This is a very early version. Therefore it will most probably not work for you, but we don't know why. It is also missing some probably-critical features.

My data is worth more to me than that. However, based on the description it sounds like a more complex version of rsnapshot. rsnapshot uses rsync as the underlying protocol, and uses standard hardlinks instead of packfiles for deduplication. The nice result is that you do not need any FUSE plugin to browse full backups: they are simply stored on your normal filesystem.

I did not look at how bup is configured, but will say that from the "set it and forget it" perspective, rsnapshot is very well made: a single declarative config file will suffice to back up all your servers.