[BBLISA] System Backup thoughts and questions...

[Aaron D. Ball]

2009/1/8 Kathryn Smith <aishabintjamil at yahoo.com>:
> I'm dating myself here. You could definitely do it to yourself on BSD, SunOS, and single digit Solaris versions. I haven't tried it on any Linux variants. Maybe they're more idiot-proof. :-)

I believe it's current GNU tar that's more idiot-proof.  It defaults
to relativizing any absolute paths you give it.

rsync does pretty well for this kind of application.  If you're "only"
in the tens of GB and hundreds of thousands of files, it should be
pretty zippy;  though since it likes to build a big file list before
it does any actual transfering, several smaller rsyncs will be faster
than one big rsync.

At my workplace, we do use rsync for many-TB filesystems, and it tends
to be the best thing we have, but it's still not terrific and at that
scale takes a lot of tweaking.