Hello everyone,

I am trying to establish valid back ups for my web server. It is a linux box on CentOS.

I have asked around and "rsync" was suggested by some of the server fault community. However, my coworker at work says that this is really only moving over the physical files and isn't really a usable "snapshot."

He suggested using "amanda" and that this did full server snapshots that are more what I am accustomed to.

I know at my company we have virtual machines that we take snapshots of and we can restore everything back to just as they were with little effort and little downtime.

Is this possible with rsync? Or would I need to create a new server and then migrate the files back and do various configurations?

I think I prefer being able to just reset everything to a point in time.

Forgive my ignorance, Back ups are something that I have never really had to worry about before.