Very helpful. A few small nits...
Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom wrote at about 16:58:08 -0600 on Thursday, December 3, 
2009:
 > chown -R rsyncbackup:users ~rsyncbackup/.ssh
 > chmod 700 ~rsyncbackup/.ssh

I would do '600'. No need to make it executable.
 > Now edit /etc/sudoers with the 'visudo' command and add some lines to allow 
 > the rsyncbackup user to run the rsync command as root, thereby giving them 
 > access to the whole filesystem. (Without allowing other commands to be run 
 > with access to the whole filesystem).
 > # allow backup user to run rsync as root
 > rsyncbackup ALL= NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/rsync 

For a slight bit of incremental security, I do:
        ALL=NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/rsync --server --sender *

which I believe restricts to read only (but it's not well
documented). Assuming that's true, then a hacker could not get write
access to your system (and of course write access is equivalent to
full ownership).
 
 > Rsync protocols >26 should work (maybe lower, don't know); I think protocol 
 > v28 is the current one. the protocol version is apparent when you run 
 > backuppc_dump by hand. if there is a protocol mismatch; the connections will 
 > open, and the rsync process start; but nothing will be transferred.

Current version is at least 30 though perl-File-RsyncP only supports
up to protocol 28. Still, having a 3.0+ version is beneficial in terms
of more efficient memory usage. Also, version 3.0 is helpful on
Windows to avoid various rsync errors.

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