[jd]

Quick correction: it's not true that rdiff-backup has to be installed on the remote server. Rdiff-backup works brilliantly with a dumb target for storage and that's how we use it in production.

Our servers periodically run rdiff-backup of all important data to a /backup partition on the same server. Then this /backup partition -- with the backup version history and metadata -- is rsynced to various dumb backup storage locations.

We've tried many backup solutions, and rdiff-backup is by far the fastest and most robust backup program we know.

[jackalope]

You might want to reconsider this approach. I do something similar, but my remote backup also uses rdiff-backup. While it's awfully tempting to rsync the local backup to a remote location, it puts your entire backup at risk because rsync doesn't care about maintaining the state that rdiff-backup depends on. If your local disk is failing with transient errors, or your local /backup mount point disappears, the next rsync could mirror the corruption, leaving you without any backup at all. It's not worth the time savings and after the initial full backup the network overhead is negligible, even over ssh.

[ars]

> is rsynced to various dumb backup storage locations.

Rsync requires a program on the other end. True, it's a more commonly installed program than rdiff-backup but it's not a dump backup.

[andreasvc]

The difference is that rdiff-backup requires the exact same version on both ends.