On Thursday, February 20, 2014, at 6:00:39 AM, Adam Hardy wrote:

I've had zero feedback from my question to the package maintainers at
ubuntu (as is typical in my experience).

For several years now, Ubuntu and all of its close relatives have used
"upstart" instead of the SysV init technique for booting. Since upstart
launches things in parallel, rather than the strictly defined sequence of
SysV, it's quite likely that the startup script is attempting to launch
BackupPC before the network or associated drives are available.

You could create an upstart startup script, or possibly simply call the
existing script from /etc/rc.local.

As for support, the Ubuntu forums at http://ubuntuforums.org provide the
best support I've ever encountered for any distribution. It's all
volunteer, no specific connection to the actual maintainers, but a number
of the forum staff do take active roles in the development process. Their
wiki contains extensive discussions of the upstart process and how to adapt
to it. I've never tried to contact the maintainers directly, nor have I
felt any need to do so.

When I switched from Mandriva to Xubuntu back in 2007, the *buntu releases
were still SysV, so when the switch to upstart happened I had to go through
the re-learning process. It eventually becomes a simpler thing, but
initially it tends to be more than a bit mind-boggling...