According to Andrew Schulman,Hi List! The problem is the following: The remote machine (sarge) has a hdd with 5GB data. It's accessible via ssh over the web. I want to make a partition backup from it to a hdd in my officeto be able to replace the remote hdd with the backup one if the remote hdd crashes (and no other installation is required).I know that dd can do it locally. But how to backup the hdd image remotely? Bandwith is no problem ( for me :) )scp remote:/dev/hdd hdd.img ?Use rsync instead, if you can. If sometime in the next several hours you have a network failure, just issue the rsync command again and it will pick up where it left off. E.g... rsync -e 'ssh -C -c blowfish' -v user@remote:/dev/hddd hdd.img or for newer versions, ssh is the default... rsync -vz user@remote:/dev/hddd hdd.img
Thanx for everyone who helped me! I'm using the rsync with ssh method and it's great for me. I change 2 hdd-s to backup the whole remote system. If I make big updates on the source than I make a full backup (the same command, but I delete everything from the target ). to the 2nd hdd, and if everything is ok than continue with the incremental backups. The commands are: 1. Go to the new root (cd /mnt/targetdisk/tagetpartition ) 2. To make a full backup: ssh source.machine.com 'dump -0 -f - /' | restore -r -f - 3. To make incremental backup: rsync -avx -e 'ssh -C' source.machine.com . (The dot at the end is needed) In this cases the ssh port is used and no need to open the rsync port on the remote machine. I experienced that the dump method is much faster for full backups than rsync to an empty disk. Best regards