[rdiff-backup-users] Staged backups

[Ian Jones]

Hello. I have about 20GB of data to backup from a remote site. Clearly, 
it's not practical to do this over the Internet in one go, so I would 
like to stage the backup over several sessions. So, my question is: what 
it the best way to do it? If I backup, say /dir/a, then subsequently 
/dir/a and /dir/b, will /dir/a get copied a second time?

An alternative approach would be to make a preliminary backup on DVDs 
and copy the files to the backup machine. If I then use rdiff-backup to 
do incremental backups, how to I ensure that the files that are already 
there are not copied again, i.e. how to I add them to the archive?

Thanks,
Ian.