On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 8:14 PM, John R Pierce <pierce at hogranch.com> wrote: > On 02/11/11 5:12 PM, Robert Heller wrote: >> >> OTOH, for mere backup using rsync and ssh might work even better and be >> somewhat simplier. > > except that provides no point in time restoration ability. > > I prefer backup schemes that use dump/restore to do occasional full and > regular incremental backups, and for these, NFS is quite useful. rsnapshot is a perl script wrapper for rsync. Works *beautifully* to provide hardlinked temporal snapshot repositories, I've used it effectively for years. dump/restore is also deprecated because it's reading the raw fileystem, and modern Linux (such as CentOS 5.x) does a lot of paging. So data that is still paged out yet, and not yet written to disk, is not backed up correctly and likely to be corrupt. Definitely switch to tar, or star if you need SELinux permissions backed up, to write to disk or for temporal snapshots of your OS. Rsync, unfortunately, has issues with SELinux restoration in my experience.