Using rsync on Windows

I posted an article on an issue of SQL Memory Paged Out During Large File Copy last month, which documented my effort in finding a way to solve the issue. Yes, rsync (from Cygwin) is still our final choice.

Today I'm going to post some tips on using rsync on Windows.

To install rsync, run the Cygwin setup.exe installer and install rsync package. After that, I would recommend adding Cygwin's bin folder into your environment path. This way, you can call rsync directly from the command line.

• Right click on My Computer. Choose Properties.
• Click on Advanced tab.
  
• Click on Environment Variables button. (The Environment Variables window will be opened)
  
• Under System variables, highlight Path. Click Edit.
  
• At the end of the Variable value, append ;c:\cygwin\bin (or wherever your installation path is. Don't forget the semi-colon in front).
  
• Click OK | OK | OK to finish.
  

Now you can use rsync to copy file in the command window, like the followings:

rsync.exe \\fromserver\share\filename d:\backupfolder\filename

But there is another issue. The destination file (copied via rsync) is owned by the user account running rsync. One may prefer to have the file permissions inherited from the parent folder instead. To fix that, I use the setacl utility from SourceForge.

The following commands first change the file ownership to local Administrators group of the backup server, clear the discretionary and security access control lists (DACL, SACL) of the file, and finally set the ACLs to be inherited from the parent folder.

setacl.exe -on filename -ot file -actn setowner -ownr "n:backupserver\Administrators;s:n"
setacl.exe -on filename -ot file -actn clear -clr dacl,sacl

setacl.exe -on filename -ot file -actn setprot -op "dacl:np;sacl:np"

Put them all into a batch file, and you have a simple script to perform nightly backup using rsync.