I have a few Ubuntu (and potentially RHEL) servers I'd like to back up to a central backup server (via rsh/SSH). I'd like to do both snapshot and incremental backups. The goal is that if one of the backed-up servers were to suddenly die, I could install a bootstrap image, restore from the backup and ideally be up-and-running immediately thereafter.
These servers have unique users and groups and some different gids and uids for the same names. I was considering rsync (local backups work fine, and I have fine-grained control so I can back up xattrs and ACLs as well) but then I realized rsync to a remote server likely won't retain these nuances as expected.
So, what's a better way to accomplish this? Is there a package that is commonly used for this purpose?