Hi Guys, Im new to Linode. A very helpful linode member has assisted in getting my sites migrated over to linode.

I now have some very basic starter questions.

What is swapping ?

And how do I set up backups ?

Swapping is where your machine runs out of RAM and starts to use disk space as temporary RAM. Disk is orders of magnitude slower than RAM, so when lots of swapping is going on the server tends to grind to a halt, often to where you have to issue a forced reboot.

Backups can be enabled through the Linode manager. For a smaller extra charge you can get a set of automated backups and one manual snapshot. Here's the page about that:
http://www.linode.com/backups/