Apple Time Machine can be used to make backups of the whole computer. Launchd serves to start a process at specified intervals and can be used make regular backups of a certain directory, for example your home directory.
The example below starts a bash script every 10 minutes, which calls rsync to do the actual backup over ssh. I implemented this to back up to a Raspberry Pi with a large USB disk attached. It requires the public/private ssh keys to be shared between the two machines.
The bash script /usr/local/bin/backup2fileserver.sh contains the following: