> While on this "backup" topic, maybe I can get your advice on an easy
> way to make backups over a lan (tcp/ip) to other machines.
...
> Is it possible to do some kind of compression on the fly and then maybe even
> decompress at the other end?  Schematically, something like:
>    Machine 1                    lan               Machine 2
> % tar cf - . >> bzip2 > ftp ...............  > bzip2 -dc | tar xf -

I did some experiments while backing up a load of old systems to CDROM.
- Taking the archive using NFS is horrid.
- Writing the archive over NFS isn't much better.
- rcp -rp is also rather slow.
what does work quite well is rsh you can this do:

% tar -cf - . | rsh user@host "cat >archive.tar"

The quoting of these commands gets interesting.....

Whether compressing the data on the 'slow' system is a win is worth
checking....

    David