I have setup a cronjob which tars up a directory daily but I was hoping to find a script that will e-mail that file somewhere.
Does anybody else use this method here? Or if not, what method do you use for automatic backups?
For emailing, you should probably look around for a Perl script. As I recall there are plenty around that do that -- or you could write one pretty easily.
For remote backups I tend to use rsync to either push archives like you have created or to pull them from a central server.
I've setup rsync and some keys so it's cronned daily. I'm impressed with it so far.
If I wanted to backup MySQL data in the same way could I rsync the MySQL directory or would it be better to cron a mysqldump and then rsync the dump data.