Best remote backup method?

[Jerry McAllister]

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}

Well, I suppose you could dump to a file and then rsync it to the
other machine...

Basically, I think dump would give you a file over there that
is in dump format and rsync would give you something that 
essentially duplicates the file system you are backing up rather
than creating a dump file.    

A dump file would be easier to pull back and restore if you had a 
major/catastrophic loss of disk and had to replace the disk (or undo 
an inappropriate rm -rf *).

Either would be about the same effort restoring a single or handful
of files from backup.

////jerry


> 
> -- 
> Paul Schmehl (pauls at utdallas.edu)
> Senior Information Security Analyst
> The University of Texas at Dallas
> http://www.utdallas.edu/ir/security/