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Searching again for a suitable replacement for Time Machine I found Back In Time, which seems to have the same functionality as tym but with a reasonable GUI. That's great and helps alleviate the pain for a non-technical user. But it is still based on rsync --link-dest and as I said before that has very big technical disadvantages when compared to Time Machine.

I use BackInTime under similar conditions and it works fast and perfect. It uses diff, rsync and symbolic links to preserve the history of every snapshot. Check it out: http://backintime.le-web.org/

I don't know if I'm one of the "smart kids" or not, but I'm a standard non-technical user and have found LuckyBackup or BackInTime run along with an online sync/backup service like DropBox or SpiderOak the most handy options.

Both LuckyBackup & BackInTime are GUI tools that set up rsync rules (even complicated ones) with an easy point-and-click interface, then schedule them in cron. They can do anything rsync can: synchronize the drives so the backup matches the current, or make a backup of everything present plus never delete anything, and they won't waste time/energy by backing up files that haven't changed;

LuckyBackup can be set to keep up to 99 snapshots of anything that changes, and they're structured in the exact same way as the original. BackInTime can have unlimited snapshots, and each backup is in a different nested folder by date/time, with unchanged files within each folder being soft links back to the most recent backup copy. Both programs just create file copies, not compressed archives.

Right now, I'm using LuckyBackup for my regular files, and I have BackInTime handling my writing directory so I can go back to an unlimited extent in case -- as happened once -- I realize that I had made a major change several months ago (more backup dates than LuckyBackup tolerates in snapshots) that turned out to be a horrible mistake, so I don't have to try to reconstruct the original from memory.

I use the web/online backup solution partly to keep my computers in sync without a thumbdrive. It's also because it acts as a free minute-by-minute backup with a few months of snapshots, so if an .odt file becomes corrupt while I'm working on it, I don't lose everything since the previous system backup. I lost about 30 hours of intense revisions a couple of years ago because the thumbdrive I was saving & transporting my files on had a glitch that evidently had messed up everything I'd been saving for a few days -- and as it turns out, it's not possible to extract text from a bad .odt file even with a hex editor.

I use it with external USB drive and it has saved my butt couple of times. Cases where I thought the focus is in certain nautilus window, then doing Shift-delete + enter in very quick fashion and fraction of a second later realizing there was another nautilus window with focus on some directory which is now nuked... As this is just a frontend to rsync and uses hard links, there is the advantage of the backed up files being available even without the backup program as normal files within the directory structure on the backup media.

It's like the Linux version of Flyback or Timevault.

http://backintime.le-web.org/

Not sure it answers the OP needs, but a short googling returns :

Back In Time

DéjaDup

TimeVault (not maintained anymore it seems)

a snapshotting filesystem with the ability to "go back in time"

Will Back-In-Time work?