Comment 7 for bug 453169

Actually, rsync already provides all the needed functionality for taking snapshots through the net via ssh without the drawbacks of sshfs (mainly, lack of hard links, due to the fact that the sftp protocol does not support them).

The problem seems to be that 1) backintime does not provide a way to specify that the backup should be done via ssh, and 2) the program expects to be able to access the snapshots vie filesystem operations for stuff it does outside of rsync.

It seems to me that the solution to this would involve abstracting all snapshot access through plugins that can route operations to the appropriate protocol (the filesystem plugin would access the files through the OS, the ssh plugin would use sftp, etc), and letting rsync do its magic for snapshot taking.