Day of Reckoning

rsync can be very nicely used to perform local and/or remote backup. I am using it to backup the content of this site to one of my local machines.

For those looking for an easy automated backup locally, you may have a look at Easy Automated Snapshot-Style Backups with Linux and Rsync.

For those looking for an easy automated backup remotely, Andreas Akre Solberg at solweb.no wrote a perl script called rsyncbackup, which is very easy to use and does what it is supposed to do nicely.

Note if you want to use ssh for remote backup, you need to make sure which protocol you are using (either version 1 or 2). The "wizard" provided by rsyncbackup seems to handle only protocol version 1, which caused a problem because my machines use protocol version 2. In this case, you cannot use the wizard but have to set up destinations.conf and ssh keys manually. To create a public/private key pair and distribute the public key to remote machines, Dave Aaldering has a HOWTO on this.