backing up shadow files with rsync?

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Thu, 2011-02-17 at 18:14 +1030, 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.

Ironically, the NAS disk that failed was a 1TB Seagate unit. OTOH I've
(touch wood) had good results with WD Caviar Black disks.

poc