Advice for dump/restore over SSH

[Roland Smith]

On Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 12:59:47PM -0500, Chuck Robey wrote:

> Your answer is perfectly correct, but a couple of reasons makes me
> want to point up a tried & true tool like rsync.  It'll do what the
> man wants while using ssh to cover security, give really nice running
> feedback (if the user likes that sort of thing, I do), and because
> it's basically a lot less general a tool than netcat, it's a bunch
> simpler for an occaisonal user to figure out the parameters on
> ... it's made precisely for this sort of job.

I love rsync for making backups of huge partitions with slowly changing
data. It's absolutely brilliant for that.

But in this situation I would not recommend it:

1) The dump/restore combo is the _only_ alternative that supports all
   the features of UFS2 without special options (e.g. flags, ACLs).
2) Rsync will leave old crap on the destination drive, unless you specifiy
   the --delete option to rsync, or if you wipe the destination drive
   beforehand, in which case rsync's overhead is useless. 
3) Rsync will not tranfers file flags unless compiled with a patch,
   which is _not_ the default.
4) nc is wickedly fast. When transferring files between my laptop and
   desktop it easily saturates the 100 Mbit link between them :)
5) Rsync is in ports, which kinda sucks if you have a broken install and
   need to start from a boot/rescue CD. Dump, restore and nc are part of
   the base system.

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