How to Backup Windows from Linux? – Part 2

Hello to all my dear friends!

In this post How to Backup Windows from Linux?, I have discussed the use of Windows Subsystem for Linux to backup files from Windows machine to a Linux machine. But it had a weird permission problem. And therefore, to tackle that, I came up with a different solution.

In this post, I will discuss the second way to backup files and folders of a Windows machine from Linux using rsync tool.

Prepare Windows Machine for Backup

1. See and add OpenSSH server capability. This is an optional feature which is not enabled by default. So this has to be manually added.

Get-WindowsCapability -Online | Where-Object Name -like 'OpenSSH*'

Add-WindowsCapability -Online -Name OpenSSH.Server

By default this runs OpenSSH server on port 22. Enable firewall if it does not allow the 22 port.

Run Powershell as Administrator and run:

netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name=”Open Port 22 for SSH” dir=in action=allow protocol=TCP localport=22

2. Start the service

Start-Service sshd

# Optionally, set it to turn on automatically every time:
Set-Service -Name sshd -StartupType 'Automatic'

3. Find the username of Windows machine

[System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity]::GetCurrent().Name

Rsync to Backup Windows from Linux

Now from your linux workstation, run the rsync command to take the backup:

rsync -auv --progress --rsync-path="wsl rsync" Lenovo@192.168.1.6:/mnt/f/  /run/media/hg/Expansion/Misc2/

WSL mounts the Windows drive under /mnt folder.