Hey Everyone

I am just putting this out here to see what kind of advice and suggestions any of you can make.

I currently have 2 servers being hosted to run a website. What I am looking into doing is bettering my backup scheme by getting a cheaper third server to preform the backups on.

I want it to be secure so that even if one of the machines is compremised then they will not be able to get to the backup server. So I would more or less like the backup server to connect somehow to the other two servers and preform the backups...this is all this server would do.

Can anyone recommend a way to do this either just a method or some software if it exists. I was thinking about rsync but I don't know how that would work since it would have to connect somehow and have a lot of access to the machine to get all sorts of stuff (/etc /home.....)

Well anything you guys can suggest would be great.

Take a look at systemimager:
http://www.systemimager.org/

Humm not really what I am looking for.

I don't need a image of the system but a backup of the data that changes like databases and stuff to be done nightly

Well, you were a little sparse on details about your precise objective.

For a regular rsync based backup set of scripts, take a look at:
http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/

The scripts are assuming that you are backing up to separate drive on your local machine, but they can easily be tweaked to make the rw mount during the rsync backup be NFS based.

I am not clear on how you intend to archive your backup - to disk? tape? or?? If you don't want to take advantage of the clever way multiple diffs are transparently made to appear as complete separate backups, you could change the way rsync is invoked, and do away with remotely mounting the backup archive altogether.

Here is another rsync based tool that looks like it might be better suited to what you want than the Mike Rubel scripts:
http://freshmeat.net/projects/rvm/?b...ease_id=166846

I plan to backup to another server that will just be used for this purpose...so in other words to its hard drive.
So I was just looking for something to make the tansfers easier.