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Easy Windows Backups using Cygwin

January 2nd, 2006 by Giovanni

I’m using CYGWIN (www.cygwin.org) with Windows XP to do things that are trivial under Linux/Unix and somewhat messy under Windows, such as provide easy platform independent backups.

Tips on using TAR

If you’re trying to add large numbers of files (eg with wildcards) and get:

> bash: /usr/bin/tar: Argument list too long

Use -T (–files-from) option, e.g.:

find /path/to/bitmaps -name ‘*.bmp’ | tar cfT archive -

the “-” at the end tells Tar to take its input from Stdin.

Encrypting TAR Backups

tar cf – secretdir | gpg -c > destdir/mysecretfiles.tar.gpg

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