This sounds nice.  You might also find some good info on http://cvs.drupal.org/viewcvs/drupal/contributions/modules/fbu/ which is a file backup module by Robert Douglass.  We were going to do some things w/ FBU back in March but did not get around to it.  It has some pear package dependencies.  (side note - then again i think there's a module to let you add pear package support to drupal w/o needing to install on server itself.)

I think the idea of FBU is for backing up the /files/ directory which has the potential for lots of new data on daily basis.

What if dbbackup could write to something in /files/dbbackup/ (and maybe rotate out every week or X number days so you can keep a week's worth of dbbackups locally, and then you have the module let you backup /files/ and send it off to email/ftp/etc.?

I think this can be pretty valuable, esp. for where you don't have backup routines setup server-wide (like w/ shared hosting) as well as you could do one-click on-demand button to backup your entire site, if you're about to try/test something  :)

sounds very handy.