On Sat, Nov 17, 2007 at 11:59:22AM +0000, Matthias Scheler wrote:
> 
> 	Hello,
> 
> I'm looking for a software for NetBSD to create off-site backups of my
> server at home. Because the upstream bandwidth of my A-DSL line isn't
> that high I'm searching for something which supports deltas and
> compression like "rsync" does.
> 
> Why am I not using "rsync"? I want to keep multiple copies on the
> target system (also NetBSD) without wasting too much diskspace.
> It would also be nice to be able to preserve the ownership of a
> directory or file without having to use "root" on the remote machine.
> 
> I've considered a script which does something like this:
> 1.) Clone existing backup into a new directory by creating identical
>     directories and hardlinks to the existing files.
> 2.) Use "rsync" to update that.
> 
> But I'm wondering whether somebody else has already done that. And
> it would of course not preserve the ownerships.


Have you considered dump/restore?  It's very easy to do incremental backups
(that only archive what has changed since the last backup of a lower level)
and send that compressed over an ssh-link for example.  You don't need any
privileges at the other site since you simply have to store (compressed and
optionally encrypted) dump files, and it's easy to extract files or entire
dirs (interactively!) from a dump as non-root as well.  All permissions and
other meta-info are saved though, and you can restore them when running as
root.


	Geert