Paul -- thanks for the suggestions. I guess that, since I am not using a tape drive for backup, there's no good reason to use dump rather than rsync, and the latter will leave me with a navigable file tree on the backup drive. This is what I use at work to back up /home/ptenenbaum (at the suggestion of the fellow who got me into Debian in the first place), so it makes sense that I should use it at home too. I'll look at your suggestions and do a migration soon.
-PT
