I'm new to *nix administration. I've used *nix installations for years in various incarnations (Xenix, Solaris, HPUX et al.) but not on the admin side. Backup is still something of a mystery to me. It seems that there are two schools of thought
cpio tar
Try rsync. Check out this great article from Mike Rubel.
http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/index.html
It will give you a new perspective on backups.