What windows attributes can I duplicate with rsync?

Albert Lunde atlunde at panix.com
Sat Mar 24 09:56:18 MDT 2012


I'm looking to copy a quality of files from Windows Vista x64 to Windows 
7 x64, between systems that are not domain members.

This would be between NTFS file systems.

I have some experience scripting rsync between Unix/Linux systems, so 
I'm considering this as an option. But I'm unclear what Windows file 
attributes etc. I can expect to keep or lose in such a transfer.

I've got a recent build of cygwin rsync on both systems, as well as the 
mingw port of rsync.

I'm guessing that nothing is going to reproduce the NTFS ACIs: I'm not 
sure I want to do that in detail, since Windows SIDs are often system 
specific.

So I might be better using Cygwin's "user" mapping to map the user 
"lunde" on one system to "lunde" on the other.

(I'm looking to transfer files that mostly belong to me, downloads and 
data, but including some assorted .exe installers.  I plan to reinstall 
most applications by hand.)

But I know Cygwin does tricky stuff under the hood to simulate the Posix 
permission bits with Windows ACIs.  I'm not sure I want to have those 
extra ACIs applied to files that did not start their life within cygwin.

And I'm unclear what "xattr" will carry going from NTFS to NTFS.

What are my options, and what can I reasonably home to transfer with rsync?

(Another option I'm looking at is "WebDrive" over sftp. But it doesn't 
have the bandwidth limiting that rsync does.)


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