Cron job for backup

[gm5729]

I am looking at trying to set up a cron job to do automatic backups of
my /home directory. I want to do a full backup each time with no
incremental backups. However I would like to use a date format for the
main folder so it is easy to tell by looking at the usb hdd when it
backed up last.

How do I generate an auto-date to the end of a folder...

cp -av /blah /media/usbthingy/newfolderDATE

I would like the date to be yyyymmdd format.

Any ideas or suggestions would be appreciated. It would be great to
just flip the switch to the usb hdd and forget about it. Let the
computer do the work instead of futzing around with manual backups.

VampirePenguin