Thanks everyone for looking this over. Let me attempt to go over some of the issues brought up.

When testing, I did in fact backup files with forks, modify them, and check afterwards, and everything seemed okay. I also checked sizes on the local machine and the remote backup and they were pretty much the same so I'm assuming that rsync is handling hard links for files and directories okay. 10.5's rsync also seems to be able to handle all extended attributes including ACLs perfectly. I haven't been able to find a lot of chatter about rsync in 10.5 out on the internet, so I had to rely on testing it myself and seeing if it worked, which so far it does.

The other thing to think about is that the rsync is not performing an incremental backup, Time Machine is doing that to the local partition. All the questions about incremental changes to forked files and such are kind of moot, because TM is the one handling all that to the local backup partition. All rsync is doing is mirroring the partition to a folder on the backup server periodically. The way to think of it is like it's a mirror RAID, but just not updated instantaneously. And the only reason you would share out the backup folder on the server is after a client machine's system had died and you've reinstalled the OS and such. Then you mount the share and use Time Machine to recover the user's stuff. That way you don't have to worry about a user messing up the backup.

I hope this answered your questions, and again, if I'm missing something or you can think of improvements, please chime in.


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