rsync on Windows questions

Simon Hobson
Fri, 01 Jul 2016 08:12:19 -0000

Fabian Cenedese <Cenedese at indel.ch> wrote:

> I'm having problems with the user rights. The backup works
> ok but after restoring some files I can't access them.

That's to be expected.
NTFS has a very rich permissions system and rsync won't be capturing that.
While it's a PITA, your best best is resetting permissions after restore.
It's probably as 'simple' (for your own documents etc) to select the
top level folder they are in, go to permissions, and have Windows re-apply them
recursively - but as to the exact steps, I can't remember as Windows is
something I avoid as much as I can get away with.

It's actually rather funny, but sad, that NTFS has a security model waaaaaay
more capable and nuanced than most Unix systems (even some with ACLs) - yet
until relatively recently, Windows didn't take advantage of this.

> And a second question: Do --copy-dest or --link-dest
> help on local targets? Or does this create even
> more stress on the disk?

I don't think NTFS supports hard links, and if it doesn't then link-dest
won't work anyway.

Overall, while rsync is a good tool for many things, for backups in the Windows
world it's probably not a good fit except for your own documents where
it's "easy" to reset file permissions after a restore. Trying to
do other than documents (ie the system and applications) is pretty well
guaranteed to lead to security permissions screwed up to the point where
it's not worth doing the backup in the first place.