On Wed, Dec 30, 2009 at 08:01:33PM +0000, Steve Fosdick wrote:
On Tue, 2009-12-22 at 21:20 +0000, Chris G wrote:
Is there any difference between the two following strategies for backing up files to a remote system:-
1 Mount the remote destination directory using sshfs/fuser Copy the files to the 'local' directory just mounted using rsync, rdiff-backup or whatever.
2 Copy the files directly to the remote system using rsync or rdiff-backup.
I would expect option two to have better performance when doing a backup in the same way that FTP will usually transfer a file faster then NFS. This is because at application protocol level there are fewer points where the sending end must wait for the receiver - when streaming the data this is handled at TCP level which has a transmit window etc.
Of course option one may have other uses that make it attractive.
Speed is actually not very important as, after the first pass (using rsync or rdiff-backup) only changes are sent so not a huge amount of data crosses the interface.
I've actually decided on yet another strategy (?!) :-
Add some disk space to my 'always on' server system.
Copy file systems to be backed up from various clients to the new backup area on the always on server disk. This can be done with an anacron script in /etc/cron.daily so it will work from systems that are only turned on intermittently - i.e. desktop computers.
Run a 'pull' rdiff-backup on the *real* backup system in the garage from the backup area on the 'always on' server.
This means I can make the garage backup system very secure (in terms of break in from the internet), I could in fact make it inaccessible from outside and it could still do the backups. The 'always on' server is the least secure system as it is the one that is accesible from the internet but even if someone broke into it and destroyed everything it wouldn't affect the incremental backups on the garage system.