rsync is bad

[Derek Broughton]

Karl Larsen wrote:

> Chris Rees wrote:

>> In case you're interested, it is safe for backing up live systems;
>> using a feature of UFS called snapshots. It also means fsck can be
>> used on a live system too.
>>
>> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/snapshots.html
>>
>     I have copied running systems to another partition with rsync and
> the new system has been perfect.
> 
That would be extremely hard to prove...

For the most part, it should work, but it's always possible for a file that
is open for writing to not be transferred in a consistent state.  Often you
wouldn't care anyway (say /var/log/syslog was corrupted - you'd probably
never notice).  Transferring a busy web server with a relational database
backend via rsync would probably be a different matter.
-- 
derek