Ryan,

You're doing exactly what I'm doing, except that you want to rsync just
differences between the live and spare machines. Unfortunately, you
can't do so in a reasonable period of time, due to the problem with
rsync and lots of hard links.

My spare machines are connected by dedicated gigabit fiber in buildings
3 km apart. Once a week, I take an LVM snapshot, then use dd+ssh to copy
the entire 1-TB filesystem image to the spare. This takes 14 hours. It's
still faster than using rsync.

Regards,
Tyler

On Wed, 2011-01-12 at 15:25 -0500, Ryan Blake wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>  
> I have been looking around for a solution to backing up the BackupPC
> server to a "hot spare" BackupPC server but haven't really found
> anything concrete.
>  
> What I'm basically trying to do is this:
>  
> I am currently using "dd" to make an exact duplicate of the server's
> configuration on another machine (that is also exactly the same).
> Once this finishes, I plan to put the drives into the "spare" computer
> and place it offsite at another location that has a direct fiber
> connection from the main site where the original BackupPC server is.
>  
> What I'd like to do is change the hostname, IP, and have the
> other server running without having the actual "BackupPC" process
> running but installed.  Then, using rsync (or some other recommended
> method), I would like to have the data copied over from the main
> server to the "hot spare" that is sitting at the alternate location
> without BackupPC running.  From my understanding and logic, if I do
> this, I should be able to easily start up BackupPC if a disaster did
> happen and be able to access the files just as if I was using that
> machine to do backups on.  So, I would like to have rsync* mirror the
> main server to the "hot spare" so if files are deleted off the main
> server, the process would delete the files automatically during a
> nightly run.
>  
> So, my question is: What is the best solution to do this?  I am
> assuming rsync since I've seen quite a few posts about it (and to be
> sure to use -H).  However, I was hoping someone would have an entire
> "command" I would need to run and the best way to go about doing this
> since the backup server will be assumingly still building backups
> overnight.  I also don't want to be retransferring unchanged files,
> only the ones that have changed (just like BackupPC does with the
> clients now).  I've also heard someone mention "storebackup" but I'm
> not exactly convinced it's any better than rsync.
>  
> Any assistance and guidance would be greatly appreciated.
>  
> ~Ryan
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Protect Your Site and Customers from Malware Attacks
Learn about various malware tactics and how to avoid them. Understand 
malware threats, the impact they can have on your business, and how you 
can protect your company and customers by using code signing.
http://p.sf.net/sfu/oracle-sfdevnl
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