rsync, vs Partimage, vs other backup

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 21:37:05 -0600,
  Robert Nichols <rnicholsNOSPAM at comcast.net> wrote:
> 
> rsync can be used to maintain a mirror of a file system as long as you
> aren't particular about preserving metadata such as access times and
> inode numbers.  The drawback is that a mirror is for one point in time
> only.  If you want multiple backup levels you have to have storage for
> several complete mirrors.

Note that this won't work for backing up some things such as database
server data while the database server is running. For those you either
need to use an application specific dump tool or shut the application
down before starting your backup.