Need advice on remote backups

[Adrian Burd <adrian plankton marsci uga edu>]

I have a need to set up a remote backup system and was wondering what
is the best best way to do this.

I've looked into the following, where 

  machine1 = machine with the directories that need to be backed up
  tape-machine = machine with tape drive attached

 1) Set up so that the directories on machine1 are nfs mounted on
    tape-machine and then do a normal tar, cpio, dump or whatever. The
    problem with this seems to be maintaining security for the
    files. By default, root on the tape-machine cannot access the user
    files on machine1 so either
   
        a) one changes the default permissions on the files - a
        solution I don't like since the tape-machine may be used by
        others. 

        b) change the permissions on the tape device /dev/st0 to allow
        the humble user (me) to read/write to the tape. Are there any
        problems with this?

 2) Set up to allow a remote dump from machine1 to the
    tape-machine. I've set up a system like this before, but then the
    whole network was behind a very secure firewall. I'd presumably
    have to allow root to perform actions on the remote machine (using
    rhosts) and that's something I'm a little loathe to do unless
    there's a way to do it safely.

Any suggestions, ideas or thoughts would be most appreciated.

Thanks

Adrian