What would happen if I tried to rsync my entire system across a network to another machine (except for whatever file controls the IP address of the machine)? Is this a valid method for cloning a machine? Are there other files/directories I would need to exclude?

Rsync is fine to do full machine backups. I googled it, (as you should have ) and saw plenty of examples of how to do it.

The main things to leave out are:
the /proc directory

The IP file is usually just what tells it to use DHCP to get an address, so it doesn't have specific addresses in it. If you do assign static addresses, then don't copy that file.

Some articles to look at:
http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=04/09/15/1931240
http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?t=268&

Peace,
JimBass

what i used for "cloning" my server

### exclude_file.txt
/dev/
/mnt/
/lost+found/
/sys/
/boot/
/media/
/proc/
/selinux/
/tmp/
sysconfig/

$ rsync -rlpogt --progress --exclude-from="exclude_file.txt" --delete -e "ssh" / root@192.168.1.10:/

That all looks good, but not technically a "clone" (which you may not need). You should probably also have a copy of at least your MBR, probably all of Track 0 would be better (to catch parts of grub/lilo). A copy of "fdisk -l" output could be a lifesaver. A seperate copy of /etc/fstab is very handy as well.

You can see some of the other things I typically backup in this thread: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=484104

As you can see, I backup quite a bit more than is technically required for a restore. But some of what I backup is for ease and convenience of a bare-metal restore. Also stuff that might be handy in troubleshooting a problem that does not require a restore.

The RSYNC man pages state that a valid use might be:

rsync [OPTION] ... [USER@]HOST:SRC DEST

However, when I ran this FROM my backup server (so that my primary server wouldn't have to bear the load of executing it), I ended up overwriting files on my primary server. Oh No! Why? I thought that this would be telling the backup server to go and get the files from 'root@192.168.1.10:/' (root on my primary) and put them in '/' (root on my backup). It looks like it did the opposite to me.

### exclude_file.txt
/dev/
/mnt/
/lost+found/
/sys/
/boot/
/media/
/proc/
/selinux/
/tmp/
sysconfig/

$ rsync -rlpogt --progress --exclude-from="exclude_file.txt" --delete -e "ssh" root@192.168.1.10:/ /

Thanks,
Sam