I have made several attempts to send this information to someone via email, and each time, it was either rejected by their mail service, or eaten by my own spam filter!  So after fighting with the mail servers for far to long — I still have no idea what, specifically, was setting off the spam alarms — I decided it would be best to side-step them completely and instead of writting up the long document describing what needed to be done, I’d just record it as a how-to video:

Backup Windows with Linux rsync:

In case you missed it, or wanted to cut/paste it, here is the file backup.bat referenced in the video.  It does not contain the “–delete” parameter, so if you want to use it, you’ll need to add it yourself.  You’ll also need to make sure both the source directory and target directory fit your needs.

One thing to keep in mind when dealing with both Windows and Linux is that they handle naming conventions for hard-drives differently.  In Windows, a drive is usually refered to with a letter and colon combination, such as drive C: for the main drive, or D: for the CD/DVDROM or second hard-drive, etc.  With Linux, all devices, including hard-drives, are managed as files and directories. For Cygwin, you’ll find the Windows drive C: refereed to as /cygdrive/c/, and drive D: as /cygdrive/d/.

I should also point out that the directory and filename separator is also different between Windows and Linux.  Windows uses a back-slash (“\”), so a program file in the windows directory would be at C:\WINDOWS\PROGRAM.EXE.  But Linux uses the forward-slash (“/”), so that same file would then be refered to as /cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/PROGRAM.EXE. 

One other thing to note is that Linux systems are case sensitive, whereas Windows is not. So the file /cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/PROGRAM.EXE and /cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/program.exe could actually be two different files.