Best remote backup method?

[Roland Smith]

On Wed, May 16, 2007 at 01:38:13PM -0500, Paul Schmehl wrote:
>  I'm presently backing up two servers in a remote location to a usb drive 
>  located elsewhere by using rsync over ssh (all three are FreeBSD boxes.) 
>  After the recent discussion about dump, I'm wondering if I would gain 
>  anything by using dump rather than rsync.  Has anyone used both?  Any 
>  thoughts as to which is "better" and why?
> 
>  The rsync command I use is:
>  rsync -avz ${LOCALDIR} -e "ssh -i ${KEY}" ${REMOTEHOST}:${REMOTEDIR}

With dumps it is easier to keep different ones around. If you rsync a
directory, all previous changes are lost. If you rsync to a different
directory every time to keep different versions, you might as well use
tar, because rsync won't save a lot of space/time in that case. And dump
will backup all ufs2 features such as flags and acls. I'm not sure if
rsync can manage that. It's also easy to compress dumps, which can save
a lot of space.

But if you need to lift a single file from a backup, it might be easier
with rsync, although dump has an interactive mode to select stuff to
restore as well.

A compelling reason to use rsync would be if the file system that is to
be backed up is so large that more than one backup won't fit on your
backup disk anyway. In that case rsync can save you a lot of time.

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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