The major distors are all pretty similar (at least under the hood ie at the cmd line).
For a Linux newbie, typical recommendations are Mandriva, Suse, Fedora. K/Ubuntu are more desktop oriented, but have the same 'engine' underneath.
There are various backup tools avail if you search here (or google).
Amanda (
http://sourceforge.net/projects/amanda/) is extremely capable, runs server on Unix style systems, can backup Unix/Mac/MS.