cwRsync – Transparent Backups in Windows XP

The Unix tool rsync turned out to be a fast and reliable way to backup my /home folder to an USB-disk.

ITeF!x provides this installation-how2. He seems to maintain the packages. The website is quite informative, though a bit confusing to me. The download link did not work today,   so I found another download location.

Installation

Supported platforms: Client – Windows 9x/NT/2000/XP/2003, Server – NT/2000/XP/2003.

[Download cwRsync.] cwRsync comes as a zip archive containing a Nullsoft Installer package. Unzip downloaded file and run cwRsync_x.x.x_Installer.exe or cwRsync_Server_x.x.x_Installer.exe (server version) :

1. Click Next at Welcome-page
2. View license agreement.
3. Select components that varies depending on package type: Client package has an optional component (Secure Channel Wrapper & Wizard). It makes creation of secure channels to cwrsync servers an easy task.
4. Specify an installation location.
5. (cwRsyncServer only) Specify a service account.
6. Installation starts. By clicking ‘Details’ button, you can get more detailed information about installation. Check if everything seems ok.

You’re DONE! cwRsync is installed on your machine.

Rsync’ing a USB-disk with a Windows XP folder

Use your text-editor-of-choice and paste the following line into it:
rsync -au --exclude '.*' --exclude 'Music/' "/cygdrive/e/" "/cygdrive/h/DATA/home/"

My USB-drive showed up in the windows explorer as E:/ therfore it says /cygdrive/e/. The Windows folder was H:/DATA/home/ which translates into /cygdrive/h/DATA/home/. Change the paths to your specific situation.

Save the file as syncUSB.bat. The .bat tells Windows to execute the script in the commandline.

A variation of the script is
cwRsync\bin\rsync -au --exclude '.*' --exclude 'Music/' "/cygdrive/e/" "/cygdrive/h/DATA/home/"
when both the syncUSB.bat and the installation folder of cwRsync are in the folder which gets updated from the USB-disk.

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