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  • Will these retain the proper metadata, GIDs, UIDs and so on, even if the target host is unaware of those groups and users? Commented Oct 25, 2012 at 17:39
  • I know that rsync will, with the right command-line arguments, and that rsnapshot can be configured to pass any custom arguments to rsync that you want. (If it's not already correctly configured out of the box.) I'd use the arguments rsync -a --delete (these will certainly be there by default) plus perhaps --numeric-ids, perhaps --hard-links, perhaps --xattrs or --acls if you need to retain those. Highly recommend familiarizing yourself with man rsync. Commented Oct 25, 2012 at 18:32
  • I had these and more already, but what I didn't know was whether this would work well or poorly for this purpose. Turns out they have been working OK (though it'd be nice to be able to archive this entirely with such options, instead of having it live as a flat filesystem with numeric IDs and such... unfortunately tar AFAIK isn't up to the task). Commented Oct 27, 2012 at 9:11
  • I'm not sure what you mean here by "flat". As to having the backup exposed as a live filesystem, iirc rdiff-backup doesn't do that and probably duplicity doesn't either since it uses a similar underlying mechanism. Commented Oct 28, 2012 at 8:42
  • Flat as in my backup is a bunch of files and folders on the disk, versus blob(s) that contain the data much like a tarball might. Commented Oct 28, 2012 at 10:23