Dean S. Messing wrote:
craigni wrote: <snip : I'm getting enamored of rsync to the point where I think that's the : backup strategy I'd like to use <snip> Since you are interested in using rsync for backups, you might profit by having a look at "rnsapshot" which uses rsync at its heart but with a nice way to configure what and how often you want to backed up. <http://www.rsnapshot.org/> An alternative to this is another rsync-based backup system: <http://edseek.com/~jasonb/articles/dirvish_backup/introduction.html> These both use the hardlink facilities of rsync to only backup what's changed, yet keep your entire directory structure intact for each backup (by using multiple hard links to the same data).
Or if you have more than one machine to back up, backuppc (http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/) will compress and hardlink all files with identical content whether from the same source or not.
I think the OP was looking for an easy way to do a complete restore, though. One of the easiest would be to download the bootable iso for clonezilla live (http://clonezilla.sourceforge.net/clonezilla-live) which will save compressed disk/partition images to local/nfs/smb/ssh locations and knows enough about linux and ntfs filesystems to only save the used portions. On restore, it will re-create the partions, copy back the contents and make the disk bootable for you.
-- Les Mikesell lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
