> 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}
Personally I never find dump/restore practical since I seldom want to backup entire filesystems for performance/diskspace reasons. I have not found any truly perfect solution; what I am using most often is rdiff-backup which combines the properties of incremental backups and rsync. It keeps an up-to-date mirror along with reverse diffs. The good parts are that: * It works without hassle right off the bat over ssh. No fuss. * It is able to backup ownership information without running as root, because meta-data is stored separately from the files (but at the same time the up-to-date mirror is a plain tree on disk so you do not actually have to use rdiff-backup for restores unless you care about ownership and such). * Other than using the rsync algorithm for transfers, the actual reverse diffs are also expressed at a more granular level than entire files. End result is that a daily backup of that 5 gig log file will not consume 5 gigs of storage per day (but will be very slow to backup). The main downsides are IMO: * It's fairly slow. I don't generally see it saturating neither disk nor networking. Sometimes it's CPU bound, but oftentimes it's just slow without an obvious bottleneck (probably architectural in the protocol). * It has some reliability issues. A common problem is that certain meta-dat is kept in gzip files, and in certain cases of rdiff-backup being interrupted these files will get corrupted and rdiff-backup will refuse to function due to the gzip library throwing an exception. * While it basically works like rsync with history and is thus very simple to get started with, it does just that. If you want things like automatic rotation schemes with hourly/daily/etc you have to script that on top. -- / Peter Schuller PGP userID: 0xE9758B7D or 'Peter Schuller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>' Key retrieval: Send an E-Mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web: http://www.scode.org
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