tape backup from remote

[Christoph Sold]

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On Thursday 01 April 2004 08:43, Sean Ellis wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 31, 2004 at 11:22:04AM -0500, Chris Shenton wrote:
> > Christoph Sold <cs at cheasy.de> writes:
> > > Amanda dumps (or tars -- your choice) to a holding disk on the
> > > backup server. After enough data has been collected to stream to
> > > tape, the tape is started. Keeps the tape streaming.
> >
> > I've also used Amanda and like it for this reason.  The only
> > problem,
>
> I'm looking at the Amanda suggestions.
>
> Just to get the ball rolling I decided to make local copies of the
> more important files with rsync. Until the tape is installed and up.
>
> I copied a directory tree last night using -avz as switches, no
> daemon running; the files lost their ownership in the copying. I've
> been searching and doing some experimenting. Running rsync as a
> daemon on the backup server with uid = root in the rsyncd.conf seems
> to preserve the ownership. Is there a better way of achieving this?
> Most of the users and groups on the source machine don't exist on the
> destination machine.

Both tar as well as dump keep uid and gid _numerically_. Restoring to 
the original machine as root yields the expected results. If you use 
newer features of the file system such as ACLs, keep in mind tar is not 
up to the job -- use star from the ports instead.

During restores, the restore job _must_ be run with root privileges -- 
otherwise restore maybe cannot write to a just restored directory. 
rsync has its uses as project synchronization mechanism, but won't do 
good when the user/group lists differ between machines. It was not 
designed as backup mechanism, see?

Regardless which backup application you use, it is possible to tunnel 
the backup through ssh onto any remote machine. No need to cannibalize 
rsync for remote backups. See 
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-isp/2003-July/000793.html 
and following, further googling turns up more results.

HTH
- -Christoph Sold
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