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The 'incremental' question was about whether you intended your backup to be just storing one or more simple copies of all your files at a point in time, or a more comprehensive system which stores a complete copy every so often, and then the changes (adds + deletes) on each backup.
The latter (like say Apple's Machine) allows you to 'go back in time' and browse the files as they existed then. It is vastly more efficient than storing multiple complete backups.
It also deals with the problem when you accidentally delete a file, and don't notice for a couple of months, by which time you've overwritten your simple backups, and lost the file forever. Which I did once.
chez_jay
As much as I appreciate everyone's time and trouble, my needs are quite modest as is my experience with Linux.
Despite fidbod's advice I've now bought a caddy and an internal SSD, which means I have two HD spare and intend to cycle those for my back-ups.