I got bored and made some useful adaptations on a backup script I wrote for class. It turned into a simple backup/recovery script that supports multiple host backups and very easy recovery.

Read more about the project on the project page: projects/pmbackup

There are a few caveats of the way I currently do it. The first, being, that file ownership is not preserved. This is only an option if rsync is being run as root on the backup server while doing backups, or as root on the client when doing recovery. I'm going to setup a "backup jail" on my machine with only rsync and sshd in it so I can have an ssh key let me login to that jail as root so backups can preserve file ownerships.
There may be a better way to do this, but jailing seems the simplest and most secure.