how safe is it to rsync databases?

[Veronica Hill]

Hi people!

	I've been hunting around the web for an answer to this question for a 
couple of days now.  I run the IT for a small company and i don't have 
a lot of experience with the type of C-ISAM database application that 
is used by my company, I deal with the general IT issues and call in 
specialists when required.  But I need to backup this 10GB database to 
a disaster recovery server on the other side of the continent.  So my 
first reaction was that if the database was shutdown then rsync would 
be a great solution!  But some opinions on the net muddy the issue.

Tridge's PHD thesis mentions that people use rsync for replicating 
their databases to backup servers.  i would have thought that that was 
OK if the DBM was shutdown during the backup......

But some people on the net like this: 
http://www.sanitarium.net/golug/rsync_backups.html
Say:
Why/When wouldn't you want to use rsync for backups?

Databases: Rsync is a file level backup so it is not suitable for 
databases. If your primary data is databases then you should look 
somewhere else. If you have databases but they are not your primary 
data then there is a procedure below to integrate a database backup 
into the rsync backups.

What pointers can people give me?

Thanks, Bye, Rony.