One of the problems I had when I tried your tools was that you offer compression, but then you only offer the relatively "fat" gzip compression; so I just fell back to my own little backup command which uses the "slimmer" bzip2. If you're going to take the big hit for compressing, you might as well compress it as well as you can.

But I like the graphical tools, I agree that it is bizarre that there is no small package that can make GUI widgets from the command line...