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Light Speed wrote:

I am running a CentOS 5.1 remote box and want to back it up to my local Mac.

I'm going to assume that this is a (virtual) server in a datacenter somewhere that you don't have physical access to, because that's what this sounds like.  If I'm wrong, please correct me.

Is the best way to do this with rsync through SSH?

Probably not, but if your options are limited than it might work well enough for your purposes.

If so how does that handle the live DBs on the box during the backup?

Very poorly.  The PostgreSQL folks suggest that you do an initial, inconsistent backup while the database is live, then shut down the database and back it up again; the second backup should be faster.  If turning off the databases for a while doesn't work, then you need a more sophisticated replication system.

Does rsync create a tar on the remote and then transfer that or are the files transferred as is to my local machine or are the files transferred and then put in a tar?

If left as files what happens to permissions?

It at no time creates a tarfile.  It uses a custom protocol that is able to do incremental backups over a network fairly efficiently, but if you're only running once, the effect is more or less as if it transferred the files one at a time. 

With the appropriate configuration (namely -a, the archive flag) it will preserve symbolic links, permissions, ownership, and modification times.

If my server needs a bare metal restore will I be able to do it remotely from my backups?

You can't do a full restore of the filesystem while using it as a boot volume.  If the server is borked, you're best off restoring to some standard configuration and then restoring the files that you need.  Backing up the entire volume is probably a waste of time and space.

Is it a managed server? Doesn't the host offer at replication or complete image service?

Thanks Gipetto.

The manged bit is handled by
<----That guy

I'm a newbie but you gotta learn sometime and I'm doing pretty good so far!

The DBs are not huge with the biggest at about 50MB but it's for my online store which is my main business so it's not something I want to mangle the data due to a half assed back up routine. I will look into replication as that has been mentioned in other threads as a safe way to do it.