Rsync backup to tar or gzip archive

[Tony Nelson]

At 9:23 PM -0500 1/26/06, Julian Underwood wrote:
>On Tue, 2006-01-24 at 12:17 -0600, Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
>> >
>> >
>> Why do you want to use rsync for this? Are you doing something
>> that you can not do using the -u option of tar or the -f option
>> or zip? If so, you may want to look at standard backup software.
>>
>> Mikkel
>
>Hi,
>
>Yeah, you're right, I suppose the -u option of tar or the -f option of
>zip will probably work just fine.  The reason I want to backup "changes
>only" is because I'm going be be doing nightly backups to a remote site
>and as the bandwidth is going to be limited.
>
>Additionally, as the file systems I'm going to be backing up to are SMB,
>I wanted the data to be compressed and archived into one file so if
>there are files with unsupported SMB filenames/lengths, they won't get
>stripped when put onto the SMB volume.  I'm going to be doing this for
>some OS X servers as well.
>
>Does this make sense?  You think this is an OK way to go about doing an
>"offsite" DR backup to a SMB volume?

When you use tar, the destination filesystem won't get a chance to see or
muck with any of the attributes of the backed-up files.  Probably the only
likely problem is with file-size limits.

FWIW, tar can back up changes only, by keeping a list of files it has
backed up.  See option --listed-incremental in "info tar", and the section
on Backups.  I find info to be inscrutable, so "info tar", U, cursor down
to Backups, Enter.

If you compress the resulting files, you have more risk that a single error
can make all of a backup (or at least any following incrementals) useless.
I wonder if there is a tool to add redundancy, like .par files on usenet?

(Note that I have only read about this stuff; I have no actual experience.)
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