Dreamhost
offers a personal backup service. Here are some notes on what I did to get it working from my Microsoft Windows Vista system.
Install All Required Cygwin Modules
First, I installed any missing required modules for cygwin, which I already had installed. At first, I had trouble with ssh, because it complained it couldn't find cygssp-0. Using cygcheck confirmed the missing library.
~$ cygcheck ssh
Found: C:\cygwin\bin\ssh.exe
Found: C:\cygwin\bin\ssh.exe
Found: C:\cygwin\bin\ssh.exe
C:\cygwin\bin\ssh.exe
C:\cygwin\bin\cygcrypto-0.9.8.dll
C:\cygwin\bin\cygwin1.dll
C:\Windows\system32\ADVAPI32.DLL
C:\Windows\system32\ntdll.dll
C:\Windows\system32\KERNEL32.dll
C:\Windows\system32\RPCRT4.dll
C:\cygwin\bin\cygz.dll
C:\cygwin\bin\cyggcc_s-1.dll
cygcheck: track_down: could not find cygssp-0.dll
Once I installed libsso0, rsync was working correctly, but required a password to be entered.
Setup Passwordless Login
Setting up
passwordless login was really easy. In an sftp connection, I made a .ssh directory from my home backup server's directory, copied my cygwin's .ssh/id_dsa.pub to the new .ssh directory and renamed the file to authorized_keys.
Determining Directories and Files to Copy
I made an exclusion list of files not to backup and named that file excl.txt. Here's what the file contains:
*.obj
*.tmp
*.sbr
*.ilk
*.pch
*.pdb
*.idb
*.ncb
*.opt
*.plg
*.aps
*.dsw
*.pyc
*.pyd
*.bsc
*.pdb
*.projdata
*.projdata1
.svn/
.git/
.bzr/
.hg/
Then I made a shell script called, backup_to_dreamhost.sh, to backup only certain directories:
#!/bin/bash
rsync -e ssh -avz --exclude-from=excl.txt /cygdrive/c/Users/David/Documents user@b.dh.com:~/David
rsync -e ssh -avz --exclude-from=excl.txt /cygdrive/c/Users/David/Downloads user@b.dh.com:~/David
rsync -e ssh -avz --exclude-from=excl.txt /cygdrive/c/Users/David/Pictures user@b.dh.com:~/David
rsync -e ssh -avz --exclude-from=excl.txt /cygdrive/c/Users/David/Music user@b.dh.com:~/David
rsync -e ssh -avz --exclude-from=excl.txt --exclude=Pinnacle/ /cygdrive/c/Users/Public/Documents user@b.dh.com:~/Public
...
Note that occasionally I have to exclude some directories that contain massive amounts of video or temporary files. I can't copy my pictures and videos without taking up more than the free 50GB space allocated for backups.
Making Automatic Backups
I ran the shell script from within cygwin, and it worked. But now, how to make Vista run it? I created a DOS Batch script called, backup_to_dreamhost.bat. It contains only one line:
C: && chdir C:\cygwin\bin && bash --login ~/backup_to_dreamhost.sh
And from the Windows Task Scheduler, I created a recurring task that runs backup_to_dreamhost.bat.
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