In your selection of a backup tool, be mindful of how the tool can be used for recovery, not just backup. It will depend on many factors. Are you working with a single computer or a network? Will you have X-windowing? Will necessary support software (Tcl/Tk libraries, Perl, gunzip, etc.) be available and will it be a version compatible with your backup/recovery software? Some may prefer the straightforward use of uncompressed tar files. The next level would be cpio or afio. These standard tools are not necessarily safer than newer, more powerful tools, some of which do good things with checksums, etc., but they are more likely to be available and work when you need them, unless you've been very careful to ensure that the newer tool and its support are configured for use in emergencies.
Also see Compression for coverage of basic archive programs like tar, cpio, etc.
I'm using (and have recovered from) a simple command like this to back up the filesystem mounted at "/xxx" to a tape on remote host "YYY": cd /xxx; find -xdev | afio -ozZv -b32k -c64 -L /var/log/backups YYY:/dev/nsto