There is an rsync for Windows, and it works

I’ve been meaning to look into backup solutions for Windows, and while there should eventually be a full Ubuntu Linux shell coming to Windows 10, it’s not there yet unless you tweak things that I can’t ask other users to do.

So I figured that when the Linux shell comes to Windows, I’ll use rsync, the Unix/Linux backup utility I’ve been using for years.

I just found out that there’s already an rsync port to Windows called cwRsync that you can pay for, with a free command-line-only edition available for download.

Since I use rsync on the command line in Linux, why do I need the GUI in Windows? I don’t.

So I downloaded it, unzipped it all, put my rsync command into the cwrsync Windows Command Script file, and it worked right out of the box.

So far my tests have been small ones that haven’t involved ssh into remote servers (I do backups to USB hard drives anyway), but I am very confident that cwRsync will work well for full Windows user-file backups. Plus it’s free and nobody’s going to bug you about buying anything ever.