Remote backups using NFS

[Alize]

Hello all,

We have bought a dedicated server from one hosting company who setup remote backups up for us and we'd love to copy this setup onto our other servers.

They have setup /backups as a mount on our dedicated server, when we copy files to that mount, they're sync'd with a remote server.

They're using NFS, I had to set it up on our server (the client) and they set it up on their server (the server).

Now our setup is this. We have a remote dedicated server, and a local dedicated server. On the remote dedicated server, i want a folder at the root (/backups), when things are copied to that, they're downloaded to our LOCAL server (/backups)

Here are the commands I was instructed to run on the client machine (i've replaced the IP addresses with fictional ones):

mkdir /backups; 
chkconfig portmap on; 
service portmap start; 
echo "123.45.6.78:/backups /backups nfs rw,hard,intr,noexec,rsize=8192,wsize=8192,nfsvers=3,noatime,_netdev 0 0" >> /etc/fstab; mount -a

123.45.6.78 = The backup server (in my case, my local server)

What do I need to do in order to make this work on the server machine?

By the way, local backup server is running Debian Linux 3.0
Remote server is running Redhat Enterprise Linux 4ES

[andrew_nh]

Any reason you are using NFS and not rsync? NFS uses UDP so it's very fast but prone to errors. Rsync is really nice for backups because it only send the changes in existing files or new file. So once you have copied all your files to your backup system it only taks a small amount of time to update.