The question in my mind is: is an automatic homedir backup concept
attainable?
I think the word we're going to keep running into trouble on is
'automatic'. We've got to get the user to leave it the hell alone for
long enough to get the data and you're going to need to tell the user
how long that will be in some sort of progress bar or notification.
I think a good place to start would be a user-enabled homedir backup
utility. Something graphical, simple but reasonably configurable
(exclusion lists, inclusion lists, etc). Then move on from there on how
to invoke it automatically.
But we're not really anywhere close to the latter afaict.
I could definitely see a good place to start is to make the backup
software nagware. It tracks the lack backup date and throbs like the
rhn-applet until the user runs its until completion.
-sv