Thanks for your reply.  I understand what you're getting at and I tried several ways to do that.  I was able to set things up so the paths are exactly the same on the two machines (the local and the remote client).

But for some reason I cannot get the local backup to actually run.  I tried both rsync and tar transfer methods - both fail.   I thought maybe it was related to permissions but I tested command line versions of rsync while logged in as the backupPC user and those all worked.

Below is the log output.   Not sure why it's not working - again it's the local backup that is not working (the remote one works great).

thanks,

Matt

Contents of file /var/lib/backuppc/pc/localhost/XferLOG.bad.z, modified 2012-11-25 20:20:59

full backup started for directory /
Running: /usr/bin/ssh -q -x -l root localhost /usr/bin/rsync --server --sender --numeric-ids --perms --owner --group -D --links --hard-links --times --block-size=2048 --recursive --ignore-times . /
Xfer PIDs are now 25010
Rsync command pid is 25010
Read EOF: Connection reset by peer
Tried again: got 0 bytes
Done: 0 files, 0 bytes
Got fatal error during xfer (Unable to read 4 bytes)
Backup aborted (Unable to read 4 bytes)
Not saving this as a partial backup since it has fewer files than the prior one (got 0 and 0 files versus 0)

-- 
Adam Goryachev
Website Managers
www.websitemanagers.com.au