One last thing that I didn’t get around to doing on my new computer is setting up my backup routine. Previously, I had been using rsync and cron jobs to backup some of my data too an off-site location. This seemed like it would be harder to do on Vista something other than Unix, but I found some tools to help me along.

cwRsync is a bundle which includes the necessary Cygwin libraries and rsync so that the rsync client can be used on Windows. There’s no GUI or anything so you still have to script the command line, but since I already had scripts from before, it was pretty straightforward (now that I found a rsync bundle for Windows!).

The replacement for cron on Vista is the Task Scheduler. I’ve seen it before in XP because I always had to disable from the system tray after installing the OS. Having actually used it now, it’s pretty straightforward but annoying. I really just want a view of all tasks that I scheduled, but apparently I have to see included with a large list of system tasks.

Now I just have to setup regularly off-disk but local backups for a larger set of files.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: geeky, protection