This tutorial will show you how to use the Linux native tool 'rsync' on a Windows operating system.

The first thing you'll need is a program that can emulate Linux on your Windows system, so download Cygwin from here.

Open up setup.exe to start installing Cygwin. For the "Choose A Download Source" option, pick "Install from Internet." On the next screen, pick the directory in which you want Cygwin to be installed. Now you'll need to choose a download site, just pick one at random because it really doesn't matter.

On the next part, where it says 'Search' type 'rsync'.


On this same menu, after searching for rsync, you need to check all the boxes under the "Bin?" column. You may need to expand the boxes in front of Devel, Libs, and Net to do this.

Finish up the installation and open up the Cygwin Bash Shell. It should be in the Start menu or you can just click Start and type cygwin and then press enter.

There are a lot of different things that you can do with rsync, you can type the command "man rsync" into the Cygwin shell to see all of the available options. Here is the command that I use to backup one of my hard drives on to another hard drive:
rsync -av --delete /cygdrive/e/ /cygdrive/g/Backup
Experiment with your own settings so you can get it just the way you want.

Last updated: 7/15/2011

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