Glad to help ... and glad ot hear you have things sorted.
About syncing ... rsync the way to go ... IMHO. The .sql dump needs to be date/time stamped file name that way you get a daily sql archived. Moodledata on the other hand only grows with time and really the only directory you *must have* is filedir ... that's where the uploaded files to Moodle reside. You don't really need cache, localcache, sessions, or muc as those will be updated from time to time so a backup of those really serve no purpose.
Since moodledata/filedir grows I've done a 'minimal backup' of moodledata using rsync with incremental switch so that only new files added would be archived instead of all of it ... and with switches to rsync command that would remove files from the archive that are no longer present in moodledata/filedir/
Do check out Webmin. ;)
'spirit of sharing', Ken