backing up shadow files with rsync?

[Robert Moskowitz]

On 02/17/2011 02:44 AM, Tim wrote:
> On Wed, 2011-02-16 at 20:48 -0430, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
>> You pays your money and you takes your choice. If you want every
>> backup of your 10GB home directory to take up another 10GB of space,
>> go for it. Most people don't actually want that. They assume (naively
>> or not) that the backup medium is itself sufficiently reliable, for
>> example I'm doing it on a NAS configured with mirrored disks, which is
>> fine for my purposes. YMMV of course.
> In my case, I was being diligent and backing up things to one of those
> external USB drives, and the external drive turned out to be a lemon,
> while the originals are all quite fine.  I didn't buy an unusual brand
> of disc, either, it was a Seagate.  I'd always been impressed by them,
> before.  On the other hand, every Western Digital drive I had, and
> friends, lasted little more than a year or two.
>
This is why I am buying a second external USB drive that will be on 
another system (ran out of USB ports on my server, and a powered hub is 
not worth it) that I will only backup to weekly or monthly and will 
store in my firebox!