For personal backup I use rsync.
I do it every week, backing up almost everything on my computers (It gives a replica, no need to uncompress anything).
It's fast because it only copies the files that differ.
I also use it to update my website from my local directory.
However, if you want to rollback by dates you might prefer the tarball/compress files approach.

We had another thread about backups http://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=726 but it's kind of outdated.