preserving Mac OS X metadata in rsync backups and restores

[Matt McCutchen]

On Fri, 2008-01-18 at 17:14 +0100, Moritz Heckscher wrote:
> Another problem I'm thinking about is that rsnapshot should be run on  
> the server to "pull" the backups over the network. One cannot run it  
> on the clients and "push" the data to the server over the network --  
> which is what I'd prefer because I plan to not leave the server on  
> all day but rather have it woken up by the (laptop) clients when  
> needed who'll take care of the scheduling of the backups (using  
> anachron or launchd etc.) One could, however, run rsnapshot on the  
> clients to backup onto a locally attached storage device.

I would like to dispel once and for all the myth that rsnapshot cannot
be used with a push.  While it is /designed/ to pull backups, with a few
extra steps one can push a backup to an rsnapshot installation on
another machine.  I outlined the setup here:

http://lists.samba.org/archive/rsync/2007-December/019470.html

How are the clients going to wake the server?  Does the server wake up
on any incoming network connection (I hope)?

> 2) If I mount the server as a network drive on the clients using AFP,  
> SMB/CIFS, NFS, ..., and then backup to this 'locally attached' drive  
> with rsync (using rsnapshot), will I lose the metadata because of the  
> transfer via the SMB/... layer?

I would strongly discourage you from pushing the backup via a network
drive.  In addition to potential metadata mangling, you lose the benefit
of rsync's delta-transfer algorithm.

Matt