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Date: Tue, 05 Aug 2003 02:09:04 -0500
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
From: Robert Citek <rwcitek AT alum DOT calberkeley DOT org>
Subject: Re: cygwin to backup Windows data
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Hello Brian,

Thanks for the feedback.

At 06:34 PM 8/4/2003 -0700, Brian Dessent wrote:
>This is too generic a question.  Cygwin is just a set of libraries that
>provide a Unix-like environment to programs... the behavior you describe
>would depend entirely on how those programs are written.  Without any
>details of the proposed solutions, no one will be able to tell you
>anything.

My guess is it works something like this:
 1) during the day, chemistry machines Chem-AA through Chem-ZZ get some
data and the save it to their local disk
 2) at some preset interval (hours, days, weeks?), the backup server
backups the data on each machine

I imagine that Cygwin would be involved in step 2.  Via a cron job, a bash
script is run on the Windows clients which checks for a file.  If the file
exists and is not currently open, rsync backs it up to a remote server via
ssh.

An alternative solution would be for the FreeBSD or Linux server to run
Samba.  The Windows clients map the Samba share and run a script via the
Windows scheduler, copying the original data file to the Samba share.  This
could be easily accomplished with a DOS batch file or perl without
requiring Cygwin.

>For example, if rsync is being used to copy files to the
>backup server then it would depend on how rsync handles files that are
>open and being written to by other processes...and that would be a
>question for the rsync mailing list, or for the vendors that are
>offering those solutions to the bid.

I would imagine this rsync-based backup scheme would involve a number of
different programs: cygwin itself, crond, ssh, ps, and bash at a minimum in
addition to rsync.  That's a lot of different programs.

I'm beginning to think a non-Cygwin solution may be their better fit and
may be the one they are leaning towards.

Again, thanks for the feedback.

Regards,
- Robert


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