any support plans for snapshots saved to server via ssh?

You can use sshfs to mount it and you can setup snapshots folder to mount point.
Rsync does support ssh but BIT also need to explore/open files on snapshots.

Dan, this is correct, but it would be nice if Back in Time would do the mounting stuff in the background. I think this should be relative easy to implement as it would not reflect in changes to the Back in Time core components. Those can work on the automatically generated mount point.

Cheers

Kurt

I tried mounting my external HD via sshfs and found after my backups grew huge that hardlinking is not possible with sshfs mounted filesystems.
If you could implement this feature, I could use backintime. I'm now testing time-drive, but to be honest, i don't like its gui.

Cheers

I'd like to second this request, it is direly needed in my environment.

I'd like to second this request, it is direly needed in my environment.

Because the need for remote snapshots was bigger than the nice BiT-GUI, I replced BiT with a bash script. I believe it should be possible to translate this for BiT. Basically, it works as follows:
- If it is the first time you create a snapshot, just rsync to a remote location
- After each rsync action, make a remote hard-linked copy: ssh <server> cp -al last_snapshot new_base
- For each snapshot taken from now on, rsync with the (latest) new base.

I think remote snapshot creation will not be such a big deal, reworking the the GUI controller in order to support the remote snapshots would be a little bit harder...

This would be truly awesome! As mentioned earlier setting up sshfs/samba puts non-linux-sysadmin folks off straight away and it doesn't support hard links, which I think rsync does, right?

Another approach is to run rsync --daemon in the backup computer/server and enable linking to that, however backintime does not allow that.

Now, for me THAT would seal the deal!

One can always establish an ssh tunnel and forward the ports without having to involve backintime changes, but just enabling a rsync: connection would be absolutely wonderful!

Did you check out Backintime version 1.0.22 with mode SSH? It will allow you to configure a remote ssh server for your backup destination. It will mount automatically with sshfs. Rsync runs over ssh and some task like copy hard-links also run remote over ssh.

Regards,
Germar

Thanks Germar.
Yes, I can use ssh and connect to remote directories using sshfs, but that does not achieve what I want.
The reason I would love to connect to an rsync server directly is to offload some processing to the remote rsync - by having the local client issue commands to the remote rsync server, the remote rsync sorts out the remote file hashs - it also avoids moving the files back and forth between local and remote machines to do the compare etc. - At least that is how I think Rsync works!!!
It certainly seems to speed up backups when the remote rsync server is used like this.
In any case, for any non local work, ssh is a given! :)

That's exactly how the Mode SSH in new BIT version works. Rsync will use its magic in the same way as with a remote rsync deamon. Also other processes (create hard-links, find, chmod) during a take-snapshot process are delegated to the remote machine. But it still need to mount the remote path with sshfs to show the snapshots in GUI and other not time-consuming task. This is all done automatically with the new mode. Please give it a try.

A good indicator for the performance improvements with this new mode compared to mounting a remote drive with nfs is the load graph that I printed on my server after the first release. You can still find both graphs (localhost and remote) in the old branch overview: https://code.launchpad.net/~germar/backintime/ssh

Regards,
Germar

That sound great Germar - I missed that detail about the ssh connection!

Cheers,
Kostas