Backup with rsync and cygwin on Windows

I recently had to setup an automatic backup scheme for a desktop Windows PC used for office tasks. I usually try to avoid complicated backup software that tend to store the backups in a proprietary format. I want to be able to browse the files in the backup, and copy one file to recover the content.

On UNIX/Linux I use rsync and thanks to Cygwin I was able to do the same thing on Windows. The goal for the script was :

• Must backup two directories into one directory located on an USB key drive
• Must not delete any file in the backup
• Must always keep the old versions of any updated file
  

Here is a bash script that backups two directories foo1 and foo2
<br />#!/bin/sh<br />SRCDIR="/cygdrive/c/links/foo1 /cygdrive/c/links/foo2"<br />DESTDIR="/cygdrive/J/backupdir"<br /><br />OLDBDIR="old."`date +%F`<br /><br />rsync -avb --backup-dir=$OLDBDIR --modify-window=2 $SRCDIR $DESTDIR<br />

• links actually is a symlink to the directory that contains foo1 and foo2. I created this symlink with the ln -s command as the path to the parent directory of foo1 and foo2 had spaces and I didn't want to deal with path escaping issues.
• --modify-window=2 is necessary on windows, else the whole set of file is saved all the time.
• --delete can be added to the rsync command if we want the deleted files to be removed from the backup
  

Then a .bat file is created in order to run the script with a double click :
set PATH=%PATH%;/cygdrive/c/cygwin/bin<br />bash.exe backup.sh<br />