systematic backups in Linux?

[Tony Baechler]

Karen Lewellen wrote:
> the ftp idea has to do with shellworld, but I am sure other 
> alternatives will work.
Hi,

I would be very surprised if rsync isn't installed.  Try "rsync" from a 
command line and see.  If it doesn't work, I think it's fairly painless 
to compile.  In my opinion, rsync is one of those tools that you really 
can't live without.

> would I require dsl to run this option?


What do you mean by require?  If you mean that, as you said, you have so 
many files that it would take an eternity to backup otherwise, I guess 
so.  If you're referring to a way of making incremental backups or only 
backing up file differences, I don't see why.  Initially you might 
because of the volume of data you're moving, but once it's all copied, I 
would think not.  Obviously text files are easier to compress and backup 
than binaries, but rsync will only transfer the differences, so other 
than the initial backup, I would think dial-up would be fine.  How much 
space are we talking about here?  If you have 1 GB of files or some huge 
amount, dial-up is out of the question even with ftp.  If you have less, 
rsync would probably work.  You can stop it at any time and it will 
resume where it left off which I don't think ftp will do, at least not 
easily.