Here is whats going on. My dad uses my laptop during the weekend when I do not need it for work. He is a preacher and I would like to make a backup of what is said on sunday. Usually he is in his office next to my lab untill about 12:00AM. The Laptop is running XP Home and I have his documents to go to /shared documtents/jmidgett . How can I have my RH9 Samba Server connect to his shared drive on the XP machine and copy all files in that directory over to /home/midgett/jmidgett on the linux box. Once in /home/midgett/jmidgett I would like a back up to run and copy everything in /jmidgett to a zip drive which is /mnt/zip or /dev/sda4.

I have putty installed on the XP laptop so I am sure that I can teach my dad how to run a script from a SSH login. Can some one here help me with this?

Is there a better way? Basically he needs a copy on the computer to take with him and I need a copy on the server. How can I do this for my dad that mostly just knows how to push the power button on and off.

Is your Linux server on 24/7? If so you could schedual a task using the backup agent in XP. Set XP to mount the share on the Linux box. Then have the backup agent to backup to the share.

A Linux script would look like this (named Sunday_files).

#!/bin/bash

# mount the Winodws share
mount -t smbfs -o username=john,password=dowe //<pc name>/<share name> /mnt/jmidgett

# copy files over
cp -R /mnt/jmidgett/* /home/jmidgett/jmidgett

# unmount share
umount /mnt/jmidgett

# mount zip drive
mount /mnt/zip

# backup files to zip drive
tar cvfz /mnt/zip/sunday_files.tar.gz /home/jmidgett/jmidgett
# or
cp -R /home/jmidgett/jmidgett /mnt/zip

I am not sure if RH mount the zip as read/write, if not you'll have to edit your /etc/fstab to look something like this:

/dev/hda1 /mnt/zip vfat uid=500,gid=500,umask=000,exec,dev,suid,rw 1 0

Then you'll need to addd this to a cron job if this is to be done every day. Off the top of my head I do not know how to do this. This would be better than have you dad run it, since people forget.

This is all off the top of my head, so if you have any problems let me know.

Yes the server is on 27/7

Now I guess that I need to lean scripting huh?

if I do a test file how do i change it to run as a script.
Chmod?

Sorry, i forgot to tell you that. Just chmod +x <file name>, that make it executable.