Im not sure I gather what you mean a naming convention or simply cat to the tar. The tar files are created using a naming convention username-month-date-year.tar. I know it would be better to just tar /usr/spool/mail but I have a few mailboxes that are quite large (IMAP SERVER) and dont want to backup as frequently. Im going to modify the script to backup a few additional things (a few user directories, etc) so will probably have it tar something like:(PSEUDOCODE)

cd /var/spool/;tar -cvf /tmp/mail-bkup.tar $name1 $name2 ..
cd /home; tar -cvf /tmp/user-bkup.tar $user1 $user2 .. 
cd /tmp; tar -cvf backup-$todays_date.tar mail-bkup.tar user-bkup.tar
[download]

Good point about checking the zip disk, I didnt think about that. The backup has been done, Just dont know on which disk!

Im not using modules such Archive::Tar because I am trying to better understand using perl as a glue language. I come from windows background and need the experience playing with the unix tools.

Currently the err checking is laughable, I know. This is just a test script that Im using from the command line and want to see whats going on. I think Ill take your sugestion and have it mail me any errors. How could I grab errors reported by tar and gzip? Can I grab standerr somehow?

Thanks!
zzspectrez