Re: [rdiff-backup-users] Some questions/problems about using rdiff-backup to a remote system

[Sam Hart]

On Fri, May 9, 2008 at 2:21 PM, Chris G <address@hidden> wrote:
> I am trying to use rdiff-backup to backup some files from my desktop
>  Fedora 8 system to a remote Ubuntu server 7.10 system and have some
>  questions regarding user(s) on the two systems.
>
>  On my desktop system I want to run rdiff-backup as root because I'm
>  backing up all of /home and thus files belong to many different users.
>  However the remote system, being Ubuntu, doesn't have a root user.
>  Will this cause any problems?

Ubuntu does have a root user... it's jut not got a password set by
default. If you wind up running rdiff-backup as root to backup all of
/home, you will have to set it up so that it can authenticate across
the systems. One way of doing this would be using tools like ssh-agent
or ssh-copy-id (but be sure you know what you're doing here...
arbitrarily copying keys between servers is a sure way to make it easy
to compromise your entire network- If you're on a home/private network
that's sufficiently firewalled off, this may not be a concern to you).

rdiff-backup across distros works fine, I do it all the time (even
across Unixes). The real problems with cross distro and cross Unix
rdiff-backups are:

1) You need to ensure the rdiff-backup tools installed on each system
are compatible with eachother. This basically means they need to be
the same version (unless this has changed recently and I didn't notice
:-)

2) User IDs will very probably mis-match. You will have to decide for
yourself if this is a problem. In your example, it's very likely that
the user ownerships in /home on one machine (Fedora) will not match
users on the other machine (Ubuntu).