rdiff-backup is my favorite tool for keeping backups on Linux systems. Today, I started using it on a Windows 7 desktop as well. At first, I used rdiff-backup from the cygwin project, but I soon noticed that, if I did anything else that required moderate hard disk access on the computer on which the cygwin rdiff-backup version was already running, my system suffered from random lockups. For example, if I tried to open Thunderbird, my computer froze for several minutes. I finally decided to try the native Windows release of rdiff-backup and all this strange behavior is now gone. My computer experiences no lock-ups and is usable while rdiff-backup is backing up some subdirectories of my homedir. I am not really sure what is the problem with the cygwin version. However, I intend to investigate this when I have the time, because I use cygwin for several tasks and I’d like to know about any possible incompatibility issues with current Windows versions.

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Tags: Backup