Backups are problematic. It is a love / hate thing for me. I love having them when I need them but I hate the prep work that goes into getting them done. Of course, that is offset by the hate for the work I have to do when there isn’t one…..  … in any case backups are necessary.

Ok. So setting up yet another server for Rsync backups. This time Windows to a Linux based server. Of course I’ve never documented the process in the past so this time I will spend the extra minutes and make a complete note of what I am doing so I have a consistent process for the next time. I also decided to look at what options are available to provide minimum fuss.

I looked at the various options of cwRsync (which I have used before), Grsync, Cygwin with Rsync as a self-build, a few tools that appear to only support their specific hosted solution like rsync.net.  After doing some reading and some basic testing I scrapped all of them and was about to give up when I tried QtdSync and finally found something that worked as intended, but…  I cannot get it to schedule the backups.

For the record:

cwRsync: skip this. The Windows GUI version is paid only without a trial to see what it is like. The free GPL version is command line and the instructions are vague. I know I have used this in the past but the developer seems to have changed focus.

Grsync: Appears to be a useful GUI but it is unclear as to how to set it to connect to a remote Rsync server and as a result I uninstalled within a few minutes.

QtdSync. SourceForge, GPL Free Software. Simple installation. On the test server it worked fine. I then noted all the steps as I installed to a production server. But I cannot get it to run as a service or schedule to work without being logged into the system. I think it looks like a great utility for desktop to server / NAS type devices for home or small business but it just does not cut it for this. I think it will be up for it at some stage, given a bit of new breath in the development.

DeltaCopy: Is held apparently in high regard and I spent several hours on this and gave up.  It connected and everything appeared to be ok, except I kept getting an error that it was wanting a directory to exist on the remote backup server before it would transfer files. If I manually added the directory it worked fine. I tried many things but could not figure it out.

That was a few days ago and I have come back to it today and it worked first time. The chair to keyboard interface playing up again!

I’ll document how I’ve used it as another post. Suffice to say I like DeltaCopy for Windows server Rsync backups.