ZFS is a great file system, providing much flexibility, and simple administration.   It was originally developed for Sun operating systems, but has been ported to Linux, and support is now baked in to Ubuntu Server 15.10.

ZFS natively supports snapshots, but there is a tool for automagically creating, and aging snapshots: https://github.com/zfsnap/zfsnap.  (Man page: http://www.zfsnap.org/zfsnap_manpage.html)

Installation is fairly straight forward:

• clone the Git repo
• copy the files to /usr/local/src
• create a link to the binaries path:

  ln -s /usr/local/src/zfsnap/sbin/zfsnap.sh /usr/local/sbin/zfsnap

After that, set up a crontab for automatic snapshot creation:

crontab -e
26 * * * * /usr/local/sbin/zfsnap snapshot -a 5d -r tank

And finally, set up crontab for automatic snapshot deletion:

 0  1 * * * /usr/local/sbin/zfsnap destroy -r tank