[colug-432] What's the best way to back up a remote VPS?

[Rob Stampfli]

It's becoming harder and harder to find a reasonably priced VPS
that has built-in backup/restore capabilities, but cheap, unadorned
VPS providers abound.  So, I've been wondering how does one go about
rolling his own backup, i.e., backing up the file system on a VPS so
that, if the VPS does somehow get clobbered, there is a straightforward
and relatively quick path to reincarnate it again.  Yes, I could
rebuild it from scratch using my notes, but that would indeed be a
long day's work.

I'm thinking of acquiring a small VPS to serve solely as my backup machine
and using rsync to push the entire file system of the VPS I want to back
up (with certain directories excluded) up to it.  But how to restore it?

If the worst case happens, can I simply reload the original image of
the impacted VPS that I started from when it was created -- most VPS
providers allow you to get back to this point -- and then, as root,
rsync from the backup VPS right over the top of this image, to restore
the VPS to point it was at when last backed up?

What am I missing?  What are the gotchas here?  I'm interested in
things like "text file busy" errors, or how it might impact system
file sharing among the various users of the physical machine on which
the VPS resides.

Or, are there some free software that would take care of everything
for me?

What do the rest of you use to back up your field VPSes?

Inquiring minds...

Rob