Hey folks.. I'm getting off my butt and have started doing some backups.
I understand that the 'operator' user is intended to be used for this
purpose, doing dumps and so forth.

How do people normally use this account (with ssh) to perform this?

On one pair of machines I've given operator a shell of /bin/sh, left his
home dir as /, and created /.ssh/ and /.ssh/authorized_keys.  That
works, but is there some cleaner and/or safer way that I'm missing?
Maybe one that doesn't require giving that account a valid shell?
(While still using ssh of course.)  I would like to make it as
restrictive as possible while still being able to get the job done.

Just looking for advice.  Thanks.