Questions[rar](server)

We have two qnap devices - one in our datacentre and one off-site. We have hundreds of password protected RAR files stored on the qnap that contain virtual machine image snapshots, with approx 20 of them being created each day.

We synchronise the two devices using rsync, and it looks like all the files are being rsynced OK - they come over and have the same file size and all the files are present and accounted for.

However, when I try to open the RAR files on the remote site, I get

Cannot open \\qnap01\FromDatacentre\Snapshots\DB001SQL1-20110626.rar

I can open the RAR files on the local site just fine, so I assume that something is getting mangled during the rsync procedure. However, the older files (pre 2011-06-20) work just fine, it's something that's only started happening in the last week.

There haven't been (as far as I know) any changes to any of the devices, setup or configuration in that time. Obviously something has changed though.

Where should I start investigating?

I am trying to design a web site with backup in mind. Large media elements would be stored on the file system and a daily backup would be done both for the DB and the file-system (which would hold the media elements).

While backing up the DB seems straight-forward I am curious about backing up the file system. WinRAR allows incremental backup and it's nice and dandy but I wish the site would be fully-usable while the file-system backup is taking place.

What if this (FS) backup takes 10 minutes and a user adds/modifies/deletes a (dozen of) file(s)?

SQL Server 2008 R2 guarantees the consistency of a backup by having a two step process.

1. Backups all the data up to the backup start point
2. Backs up the rest of the changes since the start of the backup and it's end

I don't know if something equally awesome could be done to the file system...

I tried googling around and checked the man page but couldn't find what I was looking for.

Basically need to extract a rar archive to a separate volume. I know:

rar e archive.rar 

will extract it to the current folder but I want to extract it to somewhere else. Can this be achieved without having to first move the archive to that location?

I'm using RARLABS RAR.exe to archive/backup my server data. I am familiar with using RAR for creating an archive and adding files from a folder, but what about streaming data directly into an archive?

For example, when backing up my MySQL databases I use the mysqldump command that includes a pipe command into a text file. It would be nice to skip the file step and go directly into an archive file using something like the following syntax:

mysqldump -uUserName -pPassword --all-databases > rar.exe newarchivename.rar

Does anyone know if what I have described, or something similar, is even possible?

The web seems to be flooded by password removers. I'm however on the other side. I'm interested in security of my files.

If I have a WinRAR archive (> 1 Mbyte) and use a password (> 6 characters length with non-alphanumeric characters), how secure my archive will be?