On Wed, May 16, 2007 at 10:27:35PM +0200, Roland Smith wrote: > On Wed, May 16, 2007 at 01:38:13PM -0500, Paul Schmehl wrote: > > 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} > > With dumps it is easier to keep different ones around. If you rsync a > directory, all previous changes are lost. If you rsync to a different > directory every time to keep different versions, you might as well use > tar, because rsync won't save a lot of space/time in that case. And dump > will backup all ufs2 features such as flags and acls. I'm not sure if > rsync can manage that. It's also easy to compress dumps, which can save > a lot of space. > > But if you need to lift a single file from a backup, it might be easier > with rsync, although dump has an interactive mode to select stuff to > restore as well. > > A compelling reason to use rsync would be if the file system that is to > be backed up is so large that more than one backup won't fit on your > backup disk anyway. In that case rsync can save you a lot of time.
And, if you _really_ screw things up, like 'rm -rf foo *' instead of 'rm -rf foo*' from /usr/bin, bunzip2 and restore are right there in /rescue, while rsync isn't. And getting rsync to work when /usr/bin is hosed is quite a lot of work (no compiler etc). And yes, these things happen (speaking from personal experience). :-( So making backups with something that is available in /rescue or on the boot CD is definitely a huge plus. Because if you need those backups, chances are you need them badly. Roland -- R.F.Smith http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/ [plain text _non-HTML_ PGP/GnuPG encrypted/signed email much appreciated] pgp: 1A2B 477F 9970 BA3C 2914 B7CE 1277 EFB0 C321 A725 (KeyID: C321A725)
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