[geeks] Windows drive->drive backup

[Doug McLaren]

On Sun, Jun 10, 2007 at 05:16:34PM -0400, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:

| What I really need is rsnapshot for Windows because it makes the backup easy
| to access, and it saves a ton of space.

rsnapshot is built around hard links.  NTFS supports something that's
basically the same as hard links, but I'm not sure that anything
actually uses it.  I seriously doubt it or anything like it will work
on Windows.

rsync works on Windows, but there's issues.  I homebrewed a backup
system similar to rsnapshot that used rsync and SMB file sharing to
duplicate a WIndows disk onto a *nix system, and it didn't care if
somebody was logged in, but it had one massive flaw -- it couldn't
read files that were in use.  For the OS files that's not such a big
deal, but for things like Outlook files it was, because they were
always in use if somebody never logged out -- and stuff that really
needed backing up.

Windows does offer ways around this problem, but they weren't really
options for my `do nothing to the Windows box itself' setup.

-- 
Doug McLaren, dougmc at frenzied.us