I hate to admit it, but I'm feeling stuck and overwhelmed at the moment. I have a colocated server running Debian that really, really, desperately needs to be properly backed up. I have much of the truly irreplaceable stuff "sort of" copied, but I really want to get a complete copy of everything.
This isn't mission-critical enterprise data that has to be protected and available at all costs at all times. It's a hobby server for an Android app I wrote that's kind of grown over the years to the point where backing it up in its entirety has become a formidable task. I want to start a backup process now, have it finish at some point in the reasonable future, and end up with a decent copy of everything on the server that can hopefully be kept reasonably up to date going forward.
My general goals
One-way backup of Linux server to Windows desktop PC. Some files, like logfiles I can identify by path and wildcard, can be deleted from the remote server once the successful copy has been confirmed.
The server's hard drive is 250 gigs, with about 25 gigs free at the moment. Roughly 1/4 of that is logfiles, about 1/3 of it is image files, and another 1/4 or so are daily backup copies of the database.
It's OK to skip files that are huge (> 1 gig) or locked (Mysql database), as long as it's logged in some obvious manner so I can deal with them individually later.
Limited scratch space on server, so it has to be done in bite-sized chunks.
Live server, so the backup process can't bring it to its knees or lock files. Just skip the file(s) and log it somewhere.
Prefer to encrypt in transit across Internet, but don't want to encrypt the actual backup files.
Plenty of local hard drive space for the backup, but would prefer to compress data when it will meaningfully reduce the transfer time more by more than the time it takes to compress in the first place. For the sake of argument, let's say my link rate is 2mbps-5mbps sustained (nominally 10mbps at the server end, 50+mbps alleged at the Comcast end).
I'm root on the server, and it's running Debian (I'm embarrassed to admit I don't know which specific release... it's the Debian release that was considered stable in May 2010, but a newer version had just come out right around that time. I think it might be Etch, and Lenny was the one that was just released). My home computer is running win7/64.
A good start would probably be suggestions for specific Linux and Windows implementations to try, and maybe a howto or two somewhere with examples that approximate my own use case. I've found hundreds of online howtos about using rsync to backup windows PCs to Linux, backup media files to "the cloud", and backup Linux to Linux, but nothing that really involves "backing up my (now-huge) hobby server running Linux to my desktop PC running windows"
Thanks! :-)