Vista and Incremental backups
I usually use Rsync for my incremental backups but since I moved to Vista it’s a bit of pain to get it working. I tried to install it using both Cygwin and DeltaCopy but couldn’t get it to copy international chars (i.e. åäö) via either Samba or SSH. So I looked into a tool called robocopy which is included in Vista (you can get it for XP as well). It worked fine and was easy to use.
To mirror a folder from one folder to another I put the following to a bat file (all on one row):
robocopy "D:\Pictures" "\\MyOtherComputer\Backup\Pictures" /MIR
I did some different bat files for all folders I wanted to backup. At last I created one bat file that calls all the other. It looks like:
call BackupPictures.bat call BackupCode.bat
There are loads of settings to customize your backups. For example to avoid copying desktop.ini files add /XF desktop.ini just after /MIR in the above example. Look into the robocopy help for more configuration options.
November 11th, 2008
Works for me on *nix.
du% touch bläg
du% rsync -azPHe ssh bläg verne:~
building file list …
1 file to consider
bläg
0 100% 0.00kB/s 0:00:00 (xfer#1, to-check=0/1)
sent 116 bytes received 42 bytes 105.33 bytes/sec
total size is 0 speedup is 0.00
du% ssh verne ls |grep ä
bläg
du% rsync –version|grep version
rsync version 3.0.4 protocol version 30
du%
December 13th, 2008
[...] decided to give Robocopy (that I use for complete backups) a try. The portable requirement was solved by copying the file Robocopy.exe from the folder [...]