Geert Hendrickx wrote:
> 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


I love dump restore. But... Over the network I've had terrible problems. 
See http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.os.netbsd.general/18371

Louis