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

[Rob Stampfli]

On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 11:48:48PM -0400, Rob Stampfli wrote:
> 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...

Thanks to everyone who responded.  I've cobbled together a procedure
using rsync which seems to handle the backup part of the equation
well.  The restore part, however, which I have not tried but which
others on the net claims will work, involves rsyncing the saved image
back in over the top of the root filesystem on a running system.
This approach sounds mighty risky to me, and I don't have a spare VPS
around to test it with, but perhaps with luck I won't have to resort
to trying it any time soon.  In any event, with a combination of hand-
installing some files and rsyncing in the rest, I believe I could get
another site up and running in a day or so if I had to.

On another topic, has anyone noticed that the /usr/bin/factor program
which is disseminated with CentOS 6 apparently has been rewritten and
is at least *three orders of magnitude* faster than its predecessor?
I used to use "time factor 9876543210123456781" to get a feel for the
speed of the processor on a *nix box.  It was also good for ascertaining
whether a pokey machine was CPU starved or I/O starved.  (It is usually
the latter.)  If the above could be factored in less than about 10
seconds, you had a honking fast box.  Well, now:

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
-bash-4.1$ time factor 9876543210123456781
9876543210123456781: 9876543210123456781

real	0m0.191s
user	0m0.000s
sys	0m0.005s
-bash-4.1$ 
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

That's unbelievable, or did the NSA secret algorithm for factoring large
primes get leaked to the GNU folks?

Rob