Daily backups

[Phillip Susi]

I'm trying to figure out how to set up a system to perform automated 
daily incremental and weekly full backups.  So far I have no problem 
using tar for a weekly full backup, but now I'm trying to get it to 
perform daily incremental backups.  I found the --newer-mtime option 
that looks like it should do the trick for daily backups, but I have a 
few small issues still left to work out:

1) tar gets very noisy with --newer-mtime; it spits out a line for every 
file that it does NOT backup because it's too old

2) tar seems to include all directories in the archive, regardless of 
their mtime.  This doesn't really hurt anything I suppose, but it seems 
wasteful.

3) I need a way to generate a date string automatically for yesterday. 
Something like `date --yesterday`.


Does anyone have any ideas?