AFP/SFTP Comparison and advice

[blueeye]

Hi all,

The story is as follows:
I normally have to lug a stupid backup drive around with me which can be a pain (it's for time machine) when I'm in other countries. To solve this I bought a SheevaPlug (from Marvell Computing) and have set up AFP and SFTP on it.
TimeMachine is a picky monster sometimes but I got it to play nicely. The problem is that it takes absolutely forever to backup and I'm sure those data speeds aren't normal over LAN.

The question is this:
In terms of read/write speeds and stability which is better SFTP or AFP and therefore if I have to use SFTP what should I use for my incremental backups when I'm just not in the country?

Thanks.

 

[VoR]

AFP should be a fair bit quicker than ssh because of the encryption overhead.

Timemachine is rubbish (imo), I use rsync.

 

[blueeye]

AFP should be a fair bit quicker than ssh because of the encryption overhead.

Timemachine is rubbish (imo), I use rsync.

Glad to hear that AFP is faster, that's more convenient for me.
For me Time Machine is great, one of the most convenient backup utilities I've used. In terms of rsync, which I have thought about using, how would I go about using it or should I just bite the bullet and write a cron task for it? Id erat, is there a nice little utility which will be like time machine but less picky et cetera?