On a weekly basis, I back up a bunch of stuff from the file server by burning CDs on one of the local workstations. Some of the stuff doesn’t change a lot. Copying gigabytes, even over a high-speed network, takes time. Since I’m copying files from a Linux server, I found a quick solution that works regardless of the destination: Linux, Mac or Windows. The Mac is busy making its own backups Sunday morning, so I thought I’d find a way to do it on Windows. Using CygWin, the UNIX simulator and bash shell, I could use the rsync command to copy only the files that had changed, reducing a long copy to a few minutes.
rsync -vr tedroche@the.server.ip.address:/the/source/directory /cygdrive/c/destination
With ‘v’ for verbose and ‘r’ for recursive, copying all the subdirectories. Piece of cake. Doesn’t interoperability rock? Working well with others is A Good Thing.