>I have about 4.5 GB in my home directory, and I just installed a new 120 
>GB drive on my network to use for backups. I tried a simple tar and 
>compress, and I ran into a 2.0 Gb file size limitation. There seems to 
>be a 2.2 GB avi file in the files I want to back up. After an initial 
>backup, I would like to perform incremental backups on a periodic basis.


A script with rsync (--backup --backup-dir switches) will do incremental backups to different directories. You can have it do daily incremental backups as a cron job.