Wishlist for backup

In regards to my earlier thoughts:
http://drupal.org/node/127610

Is the new release good to play with?
I have already (in my parallall module) got features like:
- configurable storage directory
- exclusion support
- tarball filename configuration (using tokens '%SERVER_NAME-%Y-%m-%d-%H%M-files')
- RESTORE (yes, it does work, even on a running site)

...That I want to see merged with backup.module.

You mention a fix for the tarbomb problem, and support for exclusions, but I can't see that in todays code.

I'd also want to look at using a better error-handling around the system calls. Is there a significant difference when using 'popen'? I use:

  // Try to avoid badness leaking onto the system
  $command = escapeshellcmd($command) .' 2>&1 ';

  $exitval = exec($command, $response, $return_code);
  // TODO test the actual error output and conditions that may happen here.
  if ($exitval) {
    drupal_set_message(t('Command "%cmd%" returned status %retval% <pre>!response</pre>', array(
      '%cmd%' => $command,
      '%retval%' => $exitval,
      '!response' => join("\n", $response ),
      )), 'error'
    );
    return false;
  }

Can I inject a few of these ideas into backup.module about now?