Chris G wrote:
I'm after backup rather than synchronisation so Unison doesn't really offer what I want. What I'm actually doing is to rsync files to the backup system
Sorry - don't mean to be thick here, but surely your first step is to ensure that your main machine and the backup machine are synchronised, which is (AFAIK) what both Unison and rsync do. If you're not synchronising the two machines, then surely you'd be using copy (cp) not rsync?
The rsync to rsync copying is *much* faster, it's almost ten times faster where there are few files that actually need copying (i.e. rsync is doing its job of only copying changed files). I guess this is because file opening to get size etc. is rather slow on NFS.
Also, you have a processor at each end working on the problem; in the attached NFS route, all the processing (apart from file-serving) will be done at one end.
Anyway I'm finally just about sorted.
Good! :-)