Hi, David. On 03/08/16 00:23, David Christensen wrote: >> I'm thinking deploy a Debian backup server using Dirvish (which is based >> on rsync --- indeed, we have packaged it in Debian). On previous >> occasions I implemented these solutions seamlessly with GNU/Linux >> clients, but now I would like add Windows clients. >> >> The idea of using Dirvish is because I had a very good experience. >> Besides using rsync with hard links for backups of files that do not >> change from backup to the next allows a considerable saving of disk space. >> >> But to use Dirvish with Windows clients I will need to install an SSH >> server. I had thought that an alternative would be to use Cygwin, but >> was looking for documentation and I have not found any uniform process >> to install and configure a Cygwin SSH server on Windows. >> >> I would like to know if anyone has had any experience in this regard >> that could share. > Cygwin sshd and rsync are okay for interactive use. There is a shell > script (ssh-host-config) provided with the Cygwin openssh package for > setting up sshd as a service. > > Unfortunately, Cygwin rsync is notorious for working for a while, and > then hanging in the middle of a transfer. I've seen this for years, and > I saw it on up-to-date installs less than a week ago. So for automated > backups, you need to detect this failure mode and deal with it. The > only way I found to get rsync working again was to reboot. > > You might find more encouraging answers on the Cygwin mailing list: > > https://cygwin.com/lists.html It sounds like a blocking issue. Researching about it, I read something about what you mention here [1]. As it says, it seems that this is resolved in new versions of Cygwin, although you say that a week ago you had this problem (with the latest published version?). But this article is "a bit" old. He also mentions a problem to doing backup over open files. Have you experienced that problem? > Currently, Windows Backup and Restore is the most reliable solution I've > found for automated backups. Either it works, or it doesn't (the last > Windows Vista box I maintain has broken Volume Shadow Copy, which breaks > Backup and Restore). It does not sound very encouraging. An alternative that I thought as a last resort was to mount the remote filesystem on the backup server using Samba and then to use rsync on the mount point, although I'm not sure how efficient it can be. Thanks for your reply. Kind regards, Daniel [1] http://www.trueblade.com/techblog/backing-up-windows-computers-with-dirvish
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature