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

[Michael Holloway]

There is a command line tool for windows i think called "robocopy" (im
not in the office to check). On my network I use a scheduled task of
robocopy to backup windows machines to a local samba share, and then
rsync that to replicate remotely. I do an incremental backup which is
normally pretty quick, but I'm not sure about restore previous versions
etc.



On Fri, 2009-04-24 at 11:53 +0100, Andrew Oakley wrote:
> 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
>