The backup of my home directory on one machine to a nice little FFS volume is still going as I write this. It has been going for several hours.
It turns out that I have a lot more in my home directory on that machine than I remembered. (-:
And £30 from #Tesco is pretty much in line with e-Bay prices, and had the advantage that I had it in my hands the day that I decided that I needed it.
I didn't even think about using dump/restore.
pax -r -w -u -v