backing up remote servers

[Alex Zbyslaw]

Glenn Dawson wrote:

> At 05:54 PM 8/17/2005, Noah wrote:
>
>> Hey there,
>>
>> Well I just built a nice happy Fedora box with a ton of dirve space 
>> here at
>> home and trying to get a scheme for using it to backup two servers I 
>> have at
>> my colo facility.
>>
>> what are my other options for backup?  I know there is rsync.  is rsync
>> incredibly insecure?  what else is out there?
>
>
> You do realize that this a FreeBSD mailing list and has nothing to do 
> with fedora or linux...

But to answer your question anyway, since we're so nice... ;-)

You can use ssh as the connection protocol for rsync, so communication 
is then encrypted.  Rsync will then be as safe as your ssh.  There are 
howtos out there about setting up ssh keys that *only* allow rsync 
connections.  I found them easily with google.

Other options would include tar, cpio, whatever dump program you have at 
the colo, and just about any other archiving utility.  It all depends 
what you want.  Rsync will give you an up-to-date copy of your remote 
drives; an archiving utility would let you do full-and-incremental style 
backups potentially giving you  multiple snapshots.  Or you could 
alternate where you do the rsync to (say every week), to get multiple 
snapshots that way.

--Alex