Re: rsync for backups anyone?

[eichin@thok.org (Mark W. Eichin)]

Yeah, we've had it packaged for a long time.  The only way to use it
for backups, though, is to mirror from one disk to another; it doesn't
have a "streaming" mode like dump or tar, so you couldn't rsync from a
remote disk to a tape, for example.  (on the other hand, spinning disk
*is* pretty cheap, and if you want to maintain a hot spare, rsync is a
lot more flexible than dump | restore...)  That flexibility is
something I've used - I used to back up homedirs at work by rsync'ing
to a local dir on my machine, with a long excludelist (netscape
caches, known cruft, non-user accounts) and then I'd run dump|gzip on
*that* and then write the dump.gz's to a multisession cdrom...  It
doesn't scale well, but if you have the cdwriter for other reasons,
and the level 0 dump gzipped (or these days, bzip2'ed) fits in 600M,
it works pretty well...
			_Mark_ <eichin@thok.org>
			The Herd Of Kittens