On 12/22/2008 04:28 PM, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
I wouldn't use dd for backups unless you wanted to restore an exact bit-by-bit image of an entire filesystem.
I've found rsync to be very effective, with the important advantage that you can run the backup several times and it will only copy what changed between one copy and the next. The rsync man page gives several examples of this. You might also be interested in rsnapshot, which basically wraps crontab scripts around rsync and can keep multiple time-related snapshots without wasting disk space.
poc
I backup our system at work (500GB) using rsync. Our New York office runs rsync against my backup volume. Over the years I have found rsync to be a very reliable tool.