I have half a dozen websites that I would like to backup on a daily or weekly basis with some sort of automatic software through FTP. I would hopefully run a cron job to dump the database on to the hosting space so that would be picked up as well.

 

Do the sites happen to have cPanel and php running? If so, then you could have a look at this.

I've used the above script on a couple of my sites and it works rather well. It's basically just a PHP file that emulates cPanel's backup facility, which most hosts seem to have configured to prevent automatic backups. The script is simply scheduled via cron to run whenever you want.

I've actually got two scripts running. A local one, which takes a copy on the server itself, once a week, and a remote one, which backs up, via FTP, to another machine, which runs every day.