[KeeperOfTheSoul]

SuperDuper! is currently very good at creating clone backups of the hard drive to provide an emergency disk to boot off of if the main drive crashes but doesn't really protect me from my own stupidity such as deleting a file then realising after I've made a backup.

To solve this problem it would be nice if any files that are being modified on the backup could first be copied to an archive folder elsewhere.

E.g. If I backup to /Volumes/Backup it could archive files to /Volumes/Data/Archive

This would allow the archive drive to be used for other things as well.

Standard archives would probably be one for each day of the current week, one for each week of the current month and one for each month (probably rolling for this one, so up to the last 12 months). Auto deleting older archives as they become obsolete.

This would lead to a layout such as:
/Volumes/Data/Archive/Daily/[Mon,Tue,...,Sun]
/Volumes/Data/Archive/Weekly/[Week1,...Week4]
/Volumes/Data/Archive/Monthly/[2006-12 Dec, 2007-01 Jan,...,2007-11 Nov]

The files would then be stored under the archive directory in a folder structure relative to their original path.

This archiving system would probably only be possible when performing smart updates.