Hey All! I was wondering if anyone knew how to set up a windows XP machine to serve as a backup server for my Linode. I looked on the internet and couldn't find a decent HOWTO on the matter. I understand that I can install cygwin and run rsync or rdiff-backup.

Can someone point a lost wanderer to the fountain of knowledge?

Thanks for your help!
Ron

Have you considered a simple sftp script added as a scheduled task?

-Mike

Not sure what to suggest in an all XP enviroment... but I encountered a problem in my system that you may also in yours. So here's some inspiration...

I use XP on my workstation, have a small BSD box doing small misc things, and a large NAS drive... the NAS is designed mainly for Windows users so SMB is it's main focus. It does also happen to share NFS, but won't save any file permissions.

So my problem became, I want to rsync my linode to the big network drive but can't preserve the file permissions...

My solution was on the BSD box use dd to create a disk image on the NFS drive, then mount it, and rsync into that which is using ext2...

I don't know if you'd be able to create something simliar through cygwin or not... I do recall the last time I used cygwin file permissions were set based on the users in Windows XP, and it ignored uids... thats why I bring this up.

rsync is available for windows. It is a very nice utility to copy files (also with an ssh tunnel)

Yeah, right now, I'm not being too concerned about permissions for the backups that I copy, so I just do an scp until I get around to setting up a proper rsync from my windows box to the linode.

I tried using Microsoft's Services for Unix, which has a NFS mounter, but it turned out to be far more trouble than it was worth. Mind you, in theory, it would have been good because it would actually have access to the permissions and perhaps be convinced to obey them. (Assuming you set up proper username/group mappings and such) But it's about as reliable over the 'net as a SMB mount over the 'net -- i.e. tends to get hung up and stop working.

Really, it sounds like you just need to tar up portions of your directory tree, compress them, and download them.