Best remote backup method?

[youshi10 at u.washington.edu]

On Wed, 16 May 2007, Roland Smith wrote:

> 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.

Tar is expensive time-wise anyhow after a while if you use compression.

Also, rsync does diffs on files, which can become expensive in terms of time.

-Garrett