All the behaviour of the tool will be determined by configuration files, default one is /etc/backup-manager.conf. All the configuration keys located in the configuration file can tune the way backup-manager will work. It is able to make tarballs in tar.gz, tar.bz2, tar and zip format, upload them to remote hosts using FTP or SSH, burn them to CDR/CDRW automatically using mkisofs and cdrecord.
--version Show the version number.
--verbose|-v Print what happens to STDOUT.
--no-warnings Disable warnings.
--help|-h Print a short help message.
--upload|-u Just upload the files.
--purge|-p Just purge old archives.
--burn|-b Just burn the archives.
--md5check|-m Just perform the MD5 checkup on the CDR/CDRW.
--config|-c file Use an alternate config file.
--force|-f Force overwrite of existing archives.
--no-upload Disable the uploading process.
--no-burn Disable the burning process.
--no-purge Disable the purging process.
Backup manager uses backup-manager-upload for uploading files. Although backup-manager is run by root (from crond), backup-manager-upload will be launched with the upload user you choose. This means that the user should exist on both remote and local machines. Keep that in mind when editing the ssh authorized keys on remote hosts.