In order to search a specific directory (path_to_directory) and all its subdirectories (-r for recursive) for files that contain a specific text string, use the following command:
grep -r "textstring" path_to_directory
The files that specify the different folders and buttons of the Gnome user interface are somehow really badly distributed all over the place. Here are just a few of the more common locations:
Icons in the panel: ~/.gnome2/panel2.d/default/launchers/
Contents of Start Here: ~/.gnome2/vfolders/start-here/
user's Home, Trash and Start Here: ~/.gnome-desktop/
BackupPC seems to be a cool application. Except for the fact that it is not easy to start working with in the first place. I downloaded BackupPC-2.0.0.tar.gz and installed it into the directory /usr/local/backuppc. Then I executed the config.pl and answered all I could. The place where I want to backup my stuff is my second hard drive /dev/hdb5 which is formatted as reiserfs and mounted at /mnt/hdb. After the config script there was a new directory in /mnt/hdb: backuppc, which contained 6 other directories: conf, cpool, log, pc, pool and trash.