I’am planning a off-site backup server and was wondering what file-transfer setup I should use?
Can ftp be a possibility?
rsync comes to mind, because it is much more efficient then ftp.
I use rsync and maintain several backup versions using hardlinks (that means that files that did not change over backups are only stored once.
A good example of this is at: rsnapshot
You can use the product straight away. I reprogrammed it for my own use (that is the nice world of Open Source), but there is no real need for that.
As always, defining your backup needs/strategy is most important. People can have very different ideas about it. Some want to backup partitions for a quick reinstall after a disk broke down. Others want to be able to get back an individual file from last week because they deleted it by accident. Other again want an archieve of all their mails for the last years for lrgal reasons. Databases are toi considered on their own.
Only when you know what you want (and why you want it) the choice of tools can start.
My need is to backup all pictures and documents on my family server to a server at a another location.
On the local network I use Backintime backuping to a NFS share.
Something like fwbackups or Areca will do ftp backups. Both, I think, can be found in the OBS.
I go with Henk: rsync, or one of the GUI’s for it, like grsync. You could even configure cron to start the rsync process at regular intervals.
rsync may be good for mirroring. However, I learned the hard way that mirroring != back up.
I would suggest rdiff-backup (also in the repos). It offers the best of mirroring plus incremental backup.
If you also want encryption, try duplicity.
Nobody said that rsync on its own is the solution. As allways in Unix/Linux there is a huge box of tools that can be combined to achieve what you want. In the case of rsnapshot (see link above) *rsync *is used for the transport of the needed changes in an efficient manner and clever usage of cp -al makes the incremental/complete backups. No need for inventing this oneself. It is all done in rsnapshot and only configuration of any combination of hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and/or yearly backups is needed.
I will not say that other tools can not do this, but the usage of rsync WITHIN a backup product is not bad at all imho.
if I understand you guys right, these proposed programs(?) are the backup-controller itself?
what I was actually wondering about was the file transfer protocol, to backup files from server1 to server2 over the internet, encrypted.
rsync does work remote. Start from
man rsync
Most tools will have remote capability.
When you decide for something like ftp, do not use ftp, but sftp (over ssh)