It is easy to accidentally commit symlinks to an SVN repository. Once you do it is not so easy to remove them.
When you commit a symlink to svn, svn doesn't commit the symlink file, rather it adds the symlink as a directory and follow the symlink adding the contents. This isn't really svn doing this but rather the filesystem.

For example (I will use a Drupal site example) I typically checkout files and modules via CVS in a contributions dir and symlink to those from the modules and themes dir so my file sistem is like this 

Ever want to shutdown a KDE application so that it goes through the normal shutdown procedure? Ever want to talk to an application from a script? Enter dcop and kdcop. dcop is a interface that lets you talk to KDE applications from the command line. kdcop is a nice gui interface to query kde's dcop server and see what commands are available for any running appications.

This is a nice little howto for tarring across a network. http://happygiraffe.net/copy-net#rsync

I have tried most Linux Backup utilities, not all mind you but most of them. In the end I just created a simple perl script that generates and runs a single tar command. dar is a good alternative to tar since it allows splitting compressed files, but for a while dar was incompatible with the version of Ubuntu I was running so I decided tar was a better choice.

Some of the advantages to this simple backup solution.