rsync to completely mirror an entire machine

[Christoph Biedl]

Christer Edwards wrote...

> Is it safe to just rsync [remote]:/ [local];/ ?  Would the /dev or
> other folders cause issues with this?  Would it be safer to implement
> a more detailed rsync script excluding certain areas?

If you're using Linux (you didn't show or tell) you should indeed
exclude /proc and /sys. Not doing this wouldn't do much harm except
wasting bandwidth and storage, especially if you're kernel still shows
the physical memory in /proc/kcore :-)

I've successfully used such a backup for a recovery after the original
system crashed. But do not rely on that before you've tested your
setup. Especially the "--numeric-ids" option is probably a good idea
unless you've virtually identical systems.

    Christoph