If a disk based archive will work, backuppc (http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/) is fairly painless and it's scheme of compression and hardlinking duplicates lets you keep about 10x the history you'd expect. If you need offsite copies you'll have to run an independent instance elsewhere or come up with a clever scheme to copy the disk though. The massive number of hardlinks it creates makes it difficult to use normal methods to copy the archive partition.
We use backuppc in production. It has awesome compression, and a great web gui that you can use to restore individual files or file trees. I have even used it on occasion to rebuild an entire Linux server from bare metal (I had to install the base OS first, but it worked!)
As Les mentioned, due to the huge number of files and hard links you will run into problems copying the backuppc files off to tape or external USB drive if you try to use rsync or cp for this. Depending on the amount of data you are working with, you might whip up a script that unmounts your backuppc storage partition, and images the entire thing to an external media with dd_rescue.
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