Summary: backups are important and Ubuntu should provide an efficient tool to do that, simple enough for the newbies and with enough options for people who want fancy features. "sbackup" is probably a very good candidate, but now it does too many stupid things to be really trusted. My idea is that Ubuntu should focus on providing a reliable backup utility.
Backups are boring and seem unnecessary to most people... until shit happens. And of course, it happens. A user-friendly distribution like Ubuntu should provide good tools to perform efficient backups, by hiding all useless technical details. After all, the user should only provide one piece of information: the place where the files are supposed to be stored. All the rest (frequency, file format...) can be set by default (and of course, tuned by advanced users).
When I installed Ubuntu 7.10 for the first time, I was amazed by the "simple backup" software. It really fits with the "Ubuntu spirit", makes complicated but important things easier.
However, just having a look at the reactions in the forum and mailing lists, people appear to be very disappointed by sbackup. I also had a very bad experience with it, not because of big flaws but because sbackup is a bit stupid. The most important bug (see attached bug) is probably that failures are not reported: everything seems OK until you need to restore your data, and unfortunately, in general, it is too late. For instance, the problem I experienced is that I sent my backups to an external hard drive formatted in vfat, and the upper file size limit on a vfat partition is 4Go. Of course, the backup files generated by sbackup were larger than that, but everything went smoothly for months until I realize that. As a result, the archives are all corrupted (tar.gz file truncated).
Fixes are probably trivial: display error messages when the backup fails for whatever reason; split the file in < 1 Go parts to avoid potential issues with the destination file system, etc. The fact that these are not implemented yet probably reflects the lack of interest from Ubuntu in such utilities. IMO a good backup utility is as necessary as a web browser or a Tetris game, because losing important data is always deleterious, even if Ubuntu is not directly responsible for that.
Related ideas:
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http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/4746/ shows that sbackup should be advertised more efficiently.
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http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/10036/ is a useless idea that illustrates the need of a backup utility.
Bug #106155