I was experimenting with some homemade backup routines for a while a go (backup to usb harddisk, worked nice, but I dont use it anymore.).)
I was courious to find out exately which files that were into a standard bacup.
By coincidence I discovered an easy very easy way to find out this.
I first made a standard bacup to workstation.
By accident I clicked on the sme bacupfile using the winrar program. To my surprice the winrar program opened the backup file and I could read all content of it. (It aperaed to be selected file directories from the server.
By the way, I think dumping and restoring mysql datafiles is one major issue doing your own backups/restores. Dont remember the details around this. I believe that the mysql home page got some info.
Arne.