[plug] back up over network

[Cameron Patrick]

Ryan Smith wrote:

> Im sure this has been asked before but I cant find it anywhere so
> Ill ask it again. I want to back up my root partition on my server
> and store it as an image on my computer. the partition is only about
> 600MB and i cant store the image on my server cause its lacking in
> hard drive space.  So would something like this work?

> dd if=/dev/hdd1 of=backup.iso bs=2k | scp ryan at tesla:

I like the rsync-based backup approach that Matt suggested too.  One
advantage that it has over the dd way is that it'll work properly even
when the filesystem on /dev/hdd1 is actually mounted.  (Rsync doesn't
guarantee that the snapshot is actually consistent, though; if you
care about that you'd have to talk to Craig about LVM or similar.
It's still Good Enough most of the time.)

One problem with rsync is that it can't preserve file ownership
properly unless it's running as root on both machines.  You'll also
want to use the --numeric-ids option unless the two machines share a
password database (which in your case they probably don't).

Cameron.