UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi All,

Im new to the forum and have only been using centos or any kind of linux for about 3months. Please forgive the possible stupid question and the mix of windows words where i don't know the linux equivalent.

Looking for a bit of advice, relating to rsync(ing) a windows machine. Ive looked through google and the forums here and the closest i can find is
(this websites forum)linux/150727-rsync-backup-windows-file-linux-box(add html)
which isn't quite what i want.

What I would like to do - if its possible - is to use a linux server in one data center to connect to up to say 5 different windows 2008/03 servers in a different data center, "zip" the contents of a folder on each then rsync it across. The folders in question are huge - upto 80gb each. My theory is once the initial backup has been done the following backups will be quick because of rsyncs wizardry and the fact the contents dont change much.

Thinking about it now, would probably have to "zip" it after the rsync?

Anyway, for reasons unknown to me, i'm not allowed to install anything on the windows machines, my boss just won't allow it. So has anyone got any ideas on how this may be accomplished?

If it helps i have admin rights on windows machines and root access on the centos ones.

Thanks for any thoughts on this.
Luke

Without installing anything on Windows machines, it may not be possible. By the way, one good thing is that Microsoft people finally added a little Un*X subsystem in Windows 2008 which includes some useful things like NFS client, etc. I'm not sure if rsync is included in that or not.

So here's my suggestion being a UN*X guy:

Create an NFS share on CentOS machine.
Install the UN*X subsystem tools on Windows machines
(Or you can share the folders on Windows and configure your smbclient on CentOS)
Copy the folders over to your CentOS machine and compress it (guessing you have less storage on Windows machine compared to CentOS)

This may not be as fast as rsync though. Performnace of cifs would be lesser than NFS (have not tested NFS client on Windows). But you can live with it.

thanks for the reply, didnt understand much of it in all honesty but will do research when i get to work.