On my small network, I have an old PC with a 200GB hard drive acting as a backup server. It can be accessed via RSYNC (over ssh) and SMB (Samba). I'm planning to add NFS once I get all the unix UIDs the same on all the machines. Anyway, I've been using some scripts and cronjobs to perform daily incremental backups with rsync from my linux boxes.

Unfortunately, other users using Windows XP (and one 98 client, ugh) also need to be able to backup to this. Though not entirely a linux question, I thought I'd ask and see if any other users know of a good way to perform backups (preferrably incremental/staged) in an automated fashion from windows to a linux server? I've considered building rsync on windows, but I'm not sure if that might not go over the head of the other users.

Thanks for your thoughts and patience with a somewhat windows-oriented question.

I guess you know about that:
http://mikerubel.org/computers/rsync...ots/index.html

I think you just have to follow this how-to, and make it so that it is the backup server that takes the initiative of the backup, and gets to the files. You would then mount on the backup server all remote places to backup, via NFS or SMB, and do the backup.

As a consequence, the things to backup on windows simply would have to be "shared", and the things to backup on other OS would have to be exported via NFS.

Yves.

Yeah, I'm actually using scripts based off that page for my Linux boxes. I was hoping to find something that ran from the Windows side, but maybe I won't find much that's suitable, or I'll need to write my own program. Just didn't want to reinvent the wheel (even if it is a complex wheel).