rsync as a background process?
If you have inotify in your kernel, check out inotify-tools.
There's an example on that page:
#!/bin/sh
# A slightly complex but actually useful example
inotifywait -mrq --timefmt '%d/%m/%y %H:%M' --format '%T %f' \
-e close_write /home/billy | while read date time file; do
rsync /home/billy/${file} rsync://[email protected]/backup/${file} && \
echo "At ${time} on ${date}, file ${file} was backed up via rsync"
done
use the inotify system of linux, in combination with incron.