Re: Need advice on remote backups

[Keith Mastin <kmastin beechtree ca>]

>
>I have a need to set up a remote backup system and was wondering what
>is the best best way to do this.
>
>I've looked into the following, where 
>
>  machine1 = machine with the directories that need to be backed up
>  tape-machine = machine with tape drive attached
>
> 1) Set up so that the directories on machine1 are nfs mounted on
>    tape-machine and then do a normal tar, cpio, dump or whatever. The
>    problem with this seems to be maintaining security for the
>    files. By default, root on the tape-machine cannot access the user
>    files on machine1 so either
>   
>        a) one changes the default permissions on the files - a
>        solution I don't like since the tape-machine may be used by
>        others. 
>
>        b) change the permissions on the tape device /dev/st0 to allow
>        the humble user (me) to read/write to the tape. Are there any
>        problems with this?
>
> 2) Set up to allow a remote dump from machine1 to the
>    tape-machine. I've set up a system like this before, but then the
>    whole network was behind a very secure firewall. I'd presumably
>    have to allow root to perform actions on the remote machine (using
>    rhosts) and that's something I'm a little loathe to do unless
>    there's a way to do it safely.
>
>Any suggestions, ideas or thoughts would be most appreciated.

For the security, there are a couple tools that you can run through ssh, 
rsync and unison. If it's just an incremental backup, I would suggest 
rsync, as unison has more options and can propogate both ways (ie. bring 
files up to date on both machines from each other).