[rdiff-backup-users] Bootable backups

[Greg Freemyer]

I've seen posts on here asking about bootable backups, etc.  As I
recall rdiff-backup was considered a poor choice.

I just was reading about csync2
(http://oss.linbit.com/csync2/paper.pdf).  Looks like great tool for
the job.  It was designed to work with clusters and keeping the main
files in sync. Per the paper, the algorithm is fairly similar to
rdiff-backup.

=======> Cut and Past from the above referenced paper
Many other synchronization tools compare the hosts, try to figure out
which host is the most up-to-date one and then synchronize the state
from this host to all other hosts. This algorithm can not detect
conflicts, can not distinguish between file removals and file
creations and therfore it is not used in Csync2.

Csync2 creates a little database with filesystem metadata on each
host. This database (/var/lib/csync2/hostname.db) contains a list of
the local files under the control of Csync2. The database also
contains information such as the file modification timestamps and file
sizes.

This database is used by Csync2 to detect changes by comparison with
the local filesystem. The synchronization itself is performed using
the Csync2 protocol (TCP port 30865).

Librsync [4] is used for bandwidth-saving file synchronization and SSL
is used for encrypting the network traffic. The sqlite library [5]
(version 2) is used for managing the Csync2 database files. 
Authentication is performed using auto-generated pre-shared-keys in
combination with the peer IP address and the peer SSL certificate.
=====<

Greg
--
Greg Freemyer
The Norcross Group
Forensics for the 21st Century