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 think if you run as per option 1 then you will lose most of the bandwidth saving and speed benefits of rsync because it will be trying to compute the checksums for the remote files locally rather than on the remote machine as intended.
That said rsync will (with the default flags set) not bother computing checksums for files that have identical timestamps on the local and remote systems so it would still probably be quicker than copying everything each time.