Method 1:
The best tool to use for this is probably dump, which is a
standard linux tool and will give you the whole filesystem. I would do
something like this:
/sbin/dump -0uan -f - / | gzip -2 |
ssh -c blowfish user@backupserver.example.com dd
of=/backup/server-full-backup-`date '+%d-%B-%Y'`.dump.gz
This...