For long I used a little script called logtransfer, which is just a stupid script that scp’s files over *2007-07-01* for example, but that wasn’t very flexible anymore. I setup rsync with some modules that enable me to transfer the logfiles in an almost similiar setup as before, but now with partial filetransfer support (continue where the beast stopped, to prevent unneeded transfers), deletion support (that if files are gone, they are removed locally as well, I wont do that before I made backups on DVD ofcourse).

This generates much more flexibility for me, because filenames can change, things can get deleted by hand, etc and that is taken into account now (I realise that this is not something everyone want to persue, but I do :) ).

Backups are now in quicker; more complete and more well, my stylish. No more need to maintain scripts myself; but just use standard tools already available that do the job very well.

(Oh, ofcourse I use rsync for much more then just my backups and logfiletransfers, I use it for the Honeynet project, mirroring my webtrees to an offsite location, making sure that my patches on the FreeBSD cluster are synchronised with my local tree etc).

Example rsync usage that I do  now:

/usr/local/bin/rsync –ignore-errors -av –partial –delete remotehost::modulename targetdirectory