[ubuntu-uk] Using rsync (or something) to remotely backup a windows drive

[Andrew Oakley]

On 24/04/2009, doug livesey <biot023 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi -- I have a drive that gets a weekly backup of a Windows network stored
> to it, and I would like to have that backed up in turn remotely.

Rsync will do that. However Rsync is not native to MS-Windows, neither
is SSH/SCP which Rsync can operate over. You may encounter problems
setting up Rsync on MS-Windows. If you achieve success with Rsync,
well done. If not... then my simpler solution, for backing up client
MS-Windows machines onto a Linux server, has been:

* Set up Samba and Windows Filesharing so that the Linux server can
see the MS-Windows hard drives over Samba

* Write a Bash script which mounts the MS-Windows share, then uses Zip
to traverse to share.

* Run the Bash script using Cron

Zip supports many backup-friendly options, including directory
recursion, incremental updates, timestamping and exclusion lists. For
example, I have mine set to exclude video files such as  AVI, since
these are so large they'd quickly fill the server.

You could probably use Tar/Gzip instead. I chose Zip because it was
better supported under MS-Windows than tgz. In particular I wanted to
make it easy for MS-Windows users to extract their own backups out of
the archive.

Another feature I considered but did not implement was to use the
"magic packet" to wake the MS-Windows clients from standby a few
minutes before the backup.

-- 
Andrew Oakley andrew at aoakley.com