Model for versioned backups on MS Windows

I've been thinking about a model for saving snapshots of a windows filesystem. Obviously you only want to backup new files or files that have changed - for stuff that hasn't changed you don't want to make another copy. rshapshot http://www.rsnapshot.org/ (for linux) accomplishes this by creating a new snapshot directory for each save point and hardlinking to unchanged files.

Windows doesn't really have hard and soft/symbolic links as far as I understand, although it has sho开发者_运维知识库rtcuts(?). What would be the equivalent link structure in Windows? Would such a versioning model work? Or would a different approach be better, such as storing the versioned backups in some kind of database? I notice that SyncBackSE http://www.2brightsparks.com/syncback/sbse-features.html has versioning - any idea how this is implemented?

Thanks

Edit: I've now had a look at SyncBackSE: the versioning feature does not mean a snapshot view - it's simply keeping old copies of a file with a prepended time stamp.

Once solution would be to use a version control system, such as Subversion, Mercurial, or Git. Depending on the types of files (binary or text), some systems work better than others.