If you're using Linux, it's something a lot like that. If you're using Windows, go fuck yourself.
: )
jwz's method is fine for disaster recovery, but it doesn't work for recovery from other kinds of errors (including human) since it only saves the last copy of the files.
In our case, the most important backups are the databases (servers can be rebuilt from config management), and having past copies definitively helps.
With rdiff-backup, we can restore the databases from any day for the past couple of years, and since it's incremental, it doesn't really take up much space.