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) :
- Click Next at Welcome-page
- View license agreement.
- 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.
- Specify an installation location.
- (cwRsyncServer only) Specify a service account.
- 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.
Rforge 