Originally Posted By: Dignan
You are correct, it will take an incredible amount of time to perform the initial backup. Upload speeds really are pretty terrible all over North America, so you kind of get screwed there.

My solution: I keep a Firewire RAID box (made by LaCie) at work that's big enough to hold all my home backups. When the image I want to push is too large, I simply carry it home, run the rsync locally, and then carry it back to work. Smaller incremental rsync ops run faster.

Even if you don't have a work office where you can get away with that, you could certainly leverage a friend's house for the same sort of thing.