Re: what's wrong with rsync?
On Tue, 2003-01-28 at 00:42, will trillich wrote:
> what's wrong with rsync?
>
> i'm heartily exploring backup methodologies and from what i can
> tell, rsync sure looks like "the bomb".
>
> any drawbacks? some good reason to NOT use it? something better?
>
> i'll be backing up the usual stuff (/etc /home ... and
> /var/backups with pg_dump output in them...)
As far as I can tell, there's nothing wrong with it. It's magic and
wonderful.
I use it in a cron job (with the "-e ssh" option for security and
password-less login) to back up a small business server onto my server.
Every 2 hours rsync backs up the financial data (a 1.5MB file in 2
minutes), and once a day it does the entire disk (4GB in 10 minutes or
so).
> apparently it does a remote diff somehow and then sends only the
> parts that need changing? i can't imagine that it's possible to
> compare two 1mb text files for differences without at least
> sending one across the wires -- yet the manpage certainly has me
> thinking that's what they claim it does. hmm?
There's a web page describing the algorithm at
http://samba.anu.edu.au/rsync/tech_report/node2.html.
It's not magic anymore, just wonderful.
--
Glenn English
ghe@slsware.com
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