OT: Backup Solutions

[Fairlight]

Confusious (Bill Campbell) say:
> 
> This works well amongst all *nix versions I have seen with the
> caveat that there may be issues with older versions of OS X and
> programs that use resource forks.  The Apple versions of rsync
> handle these properly, but other *nix versions probably don't.

I'm not so sure about that.  I've seen .zip archives with directory
hierarchies that contained the OS/X data.  Notably, World of Warcraft
addons often come with these files.  The forks sit in files in their own
directories labelled for the OS.

Rsync very well may work without issue to a mac, if regular zip does.

The more interesting part to me regarding backups is achieving a quiescent
state on the machine in a 24/7 environment where your backups are actually
worth a damn.  By the time you get from point C to point F in a backup,
there may be parts of C that are related to F that may be out of whack.

Advice "back in the day" (1993-ish) used to be to only do your backups when
the system was idle.  In this day and age, that's not actually practical in
many installations.  You can use rsync, but unless you institute a
maintenance period nightly where you essentially "nologin" the system -and-
all the services and sub-services that can -write- data, you could be in
for a world of hurt.  True, the more data you have, the better off you are.
Better to have as much as you can get rather than less than you could have
had.  But...it can still leave a lot to be desired.

I'd love to see that part of the equation addressed in general.

mark->
-- 
Audio panton, cogito singularis,