Hi there, On Sun, 22 Mar 2026, George King wrote:
I'm not sure if it's considered a good approach compared with the other approaches mentioned but I find DeltaCopy Server very easy and effective to use on my Windows box.? Rsyncd on BackupPC.
Good point. Some observations: 1. For a number of reasons, as far as BackupPC is concerned, running rsync on Windows clients is far superior to using what effectively amount to kludges like SMB. But it *does* mean that you have to load software onto the Windows clients, which you don't have to do if you use smbclient and you can accept some (considerable) tradeoffs, for example the very dodgy file excludes in smbclient: https://github.com/backuppc/backuppc/issues/252 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 2. As I've never even downloaded Deltacopy I don't feel qualified to comment on its usability or effectiveness. Basically I gather that it is versions (I don't know which versions, and that might be important) of Cygwin and rsync packaged for easy installation on Windows. These tools have commonly been installed by people here on the mailing list for backing up Windows boxes and they seem to do the job. ISTR using them decades ago, most likely Cygwin version 1.something, but I can't remember where nor why. I can't remember any big problems with them, so guess they worked well enough at the time. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 3. I quickly looked through the Deltacopy documentation just now: http://www.aboutmyip.com/files/DeltaCopyManual.pdf On page 7 of the PDF manual there's a suggestion that you may need to open port 873 on your firewall if you're backing up over the Internet. This recommendation alone makes me question the use of anything from the Deltacopy stable. Nobody should ever do that because (a) it opens up rsync to the world, which is a security nightmare you really don't want to experience, see for example CVE-2024-12084 and (b) the data transfers over the Internet would be plain text, which is of course another security nightmare although possibly not as serious as some criminal getting remote code execution on your rsync server. If you need backups to traverse the Internet, some form of encryption is in my view essential. My preference is for a VPN such as OpenVPN (which I use routinely for remote backups and which provides much more than just a backup path) but you can for example use rsync over ssh by setting it up in the BackupPC configuration. The encryption overhead may be significant. Using a VPN gives you the flexibility to offload that work to machines other than the backup server and its clients if it turns out to be necessary to make the backups proceed more quickly. It could be the difference between having a backup and not having one. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 4. The documentation gives me little idea which versions of Windows are supported by Deltacopy. The page at http://www.aboutmyip.com/AboutMyXApp/DeltaCopy.jsp gives under "System Requirements" * XP, 2000, 2003, 2008, Vista and Windows 7. We have not tested DeltaCopy on Win9x. * 10 MB hard disk * 64 MB ram * 1 GHz processor or better which looks like it could use an update. It doesn't say for example that Cygwin dropped support for XP in 2015: https://sourceware.org/pipermail/cygwin-announce/2015-August/006392.html that Cygwin dropped 32-bit support altogether in 2022: https://cygwin.com/pipermail/cygwin/2022-November/252542.html nor that Cygwin support of Windows 7, Windows 8, Server 2008 R2 and Server 2012 was dropped in version 3.5 early in 2024: https://cygwin.com/pipermail/cygwin-announce/2024-February/011524.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 5. One of the issues people come up against with Cygwin/rsync is that backing up open files can be problematic because Windows restricts access to them. If it's essential to back up open files then people usually get around this using "shadow copies" of the data, see e.g. http://www.michaelstowe.com/backuppc/ which links to http://www.goodjobsucking.com/?p=62 giving a very clear account of one implementation. This seems to be a problem that has been fairly well put to bed. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Other observations invited and very welcome. HTH -- 73, Ged. _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list [email protected] List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki: https://github.com/backuppc/backuppc/wiki Project: https://backuppc.github.io/backuppc/
