On Dec 4, 2007, at 2:01 PM, Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
Seriously though, I use rdiff-backup and cron jobs to pull backups of critical data and /etc using pub-key ssh authentication to make the connections. I have no bare-metal restoration plan, just reinstall, install packages, recover data and /etc and roll on.
What's your experience with rdiff-backup been? When I tried it I found it way too fragile to be a viable backup solution. If the backup was interrupted for any reason, it would corrupt the history data, and all future backup or restore attempts in that directory would cause rdiff-backup to crash. Also, it had the usual Python error recovery problems -- whenever an error occurred the actual error message was buried somewhere in a gargantuan stack trace.
These days I use BackupPC, with rsync as the transfer method.