[jackalope]

You might want to reconsider this approach. I do something similar, but my remote backup also uses rdiff-backup. While it's awfully tempting to rsync the local backup to a remote location, it puts your entire backup at risk because rsync doesn't care about maintaining the state that rdiff-backup depends on. If your local disk is failing with transient errors, or your local /backup mount point disappears, the next rsync could mirror the corruption, leaving you without any backup at all. It's not worth the time savings and after the initial full backup the network overhead is negligible, even over ssh.