Well I finally spat the dummy and deleted my backups from V Stuff and then got rid of V Stuff itself

. I was only really playing with it anyway since a Windows only option just doesn't suit me - I can get any prints I want directly so...
Google eventually pointed me to rsyncrypto which compresses and encrypts stuff in a way that allows rsync to still work efficiently. Another search led me to a cheap online storage company in the US ("Online Storage") who offer rsync, ftp, webdav etc. etc.
I took the plunge and signed up - 15$ for a year seems ok to me. None of the free sites offer anywhere near enough disk space from what I've seen in the past.
I made some notes on what I've been doing to get this setup on my openSuSE 11.1 box - it does the job that I need it do and it certainly won't suit everybody. The notes are
here for anybody that's interested.
So, finally, I've got what I hope will turn out to be a reasonably reliable, reasonably secure and cheap external backup that's all automated from my linux box.
Cheers,
Dave