[rdiff-backup-users] wiki suggestions

[rader]

I just started my first WinXP to Linux backup and I'll throw out a
few comments here about the "BackupFromWindowsToLinux" wiki page. [1]
(Sorry, but I'm just not motivated enough to actually update the page.)


1. I found that generating an SSH key pair with "puttygen.exe"
generates keys in a Putty-specific format which therefore can not be
imported into Linux.  Despite munging them in various obvious ways
(trying to make them look like keys from ssh-keygen) I couldn't
get them to work.  There is a web page "Using Putty on Windows to
[sic] login Linux securely via OpenSSH" which has very succinct
directions for generating keys with OpenSSH and then converting them
into Putty's format using puttygen.exe.  I humbly suggest the
BackupFromWindowsToLinux wiki page plagiarized that information:

 a. On the Linux system, generate id_rsa and id_rsa.pub 
    SSH keys by doing "ssh-keygen -t rsa".  Do not use
    use a passphrase.

 b. Securely transfer (e.g. SFTP fetch ) the resulting 
    ~/.ssh/id_rsa (private) key onto the WinXP machine.

 c. On the WinXP machine, execute "puttygen.exe"

 d. Do "File -> Load private key" to load the id_rsa key into
    puttygen.exe.  

 e. Save the resulting (Putty specific) public and private keys 
    as "publickey.ppk" and "privatekey.ppk"


2. It took me a few minutes to figure out how to a full backup of
C:\ going.  The magic is to escape the "\" with "//".  For example...

  rdiff-backup.exe -v5 --no-hard-links --print-statistics
    --remote-schema "plink.exe -i privatekey.ppk
    %s rdiff-backup --server" c://\
    address@hidden::/destinationdirectory

That too ought to be mentioned, me thinks, for obvious reasons.

cheers,
steve
--
director of computing
department of physics
university of wisconsin

 [1] http://wiki.rdiff-backup.org/wiki/index.php/BackupFromWindowsToLinux
 [2] http://linux-sxs.org/networking/openssh.putty.html