How to backup a 500gb server to my home computer?

what is the best way to backup my server? it has 500gb of data - most of it never changes (photos, videos) so only needs to be downloaded once. At the moment i do big tar.gz's and download them manually. takes forever.

i have heard about rsync - what is this like? i prefer to download it at the weekend too so i need to be able to start & stop

any ideas?

Solution 1:

RSync is ideally suited to this type of task.

  RSync
  http://rsync.samba.org/

Additionally, one of the beauties of RSync is that you can use it repeatedly over time to update your backup with only the changes -- both copies will be synchronized, but you'll consume a lot less bandwidth to transfer only the updated files (and this helps to keep both your costs and time requirements down).

Solution 2:

On the office side:

• Open port 873 to the rsync server.
• Find out your rsync folder name.
• Go home.

At home:

• Windows
• Open port 873
• Install Cygwin packages and include rsync.

rsync command:

• rsync --help
• rsync -R source dest
• rsync -R XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX::rsync.folder.name /cygdrive/c/office.data

Then wait …