Perhaps you've confused desktop backups and tape backups? Desktop
backups work through the server-manager, and back up a minimum
amount of stuff, just so you can recreate network configuration
and users and ibays and so forth later. One thing they back up is
the MySQL databases.
If you don't want the whole desktop backup, you could do the
backup, throw away the resulting file, put
/home/e-smith/db/mysql/mysql.dump in a safe place, reinstall,
and then restore the mysql databases by running mysql with
the mysql.dump file (it's SQL).
-Rich