Hi-- A friend recently gave me an old P2-450 that he wasn't using, and I am going to put Linux on it (my other system runs Win2K). I've used linux a bit and am a bit beyond a newbie, but hardly an expert.

Anyway, what I want to do with this is run the Linux computer all the time and then set it up to automatically grab certain folders from the Windows machine to back them up. I'm sure there is a simple way to do this; can anyone tell me how? I imagine there is some sort of FTP command that can do it, or maybe a CRON job?

I've never explored CRON before.

Anyway, I haven't put Linux on the p450 yet, but I am currently downloading Knoppix as I want to give it a try.

Thanks for any and all help.

This can be setup pretty quickly. If I lose you anywhere here, let me know, and I can elaborate more, but this should give you the general idea.

You would share whatever directories you wanted to backup on the Windows 2000 machine using Window's standard File Sharing service, and have your Linux system mount them at boot (with /etc/fstab). You will need to have SMBFS support in your kernel (most distro's do) for this.

Then, make a simple script that uses rsync to synchronize the mount points of the shared directories to directories on the local Linux machine, and put that in as an hourly cron job (or maybe daily).

Now your Linux machine will synchronize it's own backups with the files on your Windows 2000 machine as often as you specify.

You might then want to look into a cheap tape drive, which you can setup to have all of the backups copied to every day or two.