Thanks for this - nice to be able to stash it elsewhere, and one of those things that "I should be doing but haven't gotten around to yet". I checked my NOAA folder, and it's only 1MB (and that's complete since 4/2003). No reason not to include it, especially since text will crunch down to almost nothing. The database is 315MB, but it takes about 10 seconds to read, and since my backup file is only 89MB at the end why not include it as well?
I also added it to the crontab as a shell script that runs just before midnight daily. Now I have automated backups :D
Thanks again,
Tom