rsync
Headache-free, general-purpose backup command.
It probably helps to alias or script this one.
If working with very low-entropy files, perhaps better to remove the --size-only comparison and appeal to timestamps for file differentiation. Otherwise, over the years I found too much superfluous copying/updating merely due to timestamps discrepancy, annoying especially for large-scale backups across drives.
The following invocation also excludes files newer on the receiver.
rsync --archive --update --cvs-exclude --prune-empty-dirs --verbose \
--human-readable --size-only --delete --stats <source> <dest>
# Alternatively:
rsync -auCmvh --size-only --delete --stats <source> <dest>
Sync from a plain file list (relative to the source directory).
rsync ... --ignore-missing-args --files-from=source.list \
--recursive <source> <dest>
Tar, gzip, encrypt and timestamp from a file list
tar -zcvf - --files-from source.list |\
gpg -r <gpg-id> -e > "$dest_prefix""_`date +\%Y\%m\%d`.tar.gz.gpg"
Questions, comments? Connect.