Is there a way for cygwin to access a Linux (ext3) partition?

Question

I'd like to be able to access a Linux partition through cygwin on Windows. My purpose is to backup data from a Linux server to my home computer running Windows 7. Right now it mostly works, except when there's files with invalid characters or if there are multiple files with the same letters but different case.

Answer 1

What I do is use a VirtualBox. This can be done in two ways,

1. Store your data in VMDK files
   • this is pretty simple and safe; you can also keep different sized VMDK files for your backups
2. Create a RAW disk access to a actual EXT3 partition on your HDD
   • be warned that this is a tricky way and you can easily break your ext3 partition
     (particularly if you use suspend or hibernate while it is mounted)
   • and, don't try to mount your Windows boot partition RAW in write-mode, ever.

Update:
If you get interested in automation: VBoxManage lets you control the VM from command line.

Answer 2

As I understand it, you want to make a backup by copying a complete directory tree to a different computer, file by file. This is admittedly one way of making a backup, but I would suggest a different approach, especially since it appears to work out badly in your case.

What I do myself (in principle), it to create tarballs of the files I want to back up locally on the Linux server and save them somewhere else through ssh (actually by sshfs, but no matter). This should eliminate problems with filenames as long as the tar implementation on the Linux server handles them.

You could do this by setting up cygwin with an ssh server for the Linux server to connect to, or with a command like

ssh $server "tar c -C /var/important ./" > backup.tar

run from cygwin on the computer you want to keep the backup on. You could also save the tarballs on the Linux server and transfer them afterwards.

If you want to reduce the amount of bandwidth and diskspace comsumed, I suggest using star in stead of gnu tar, and it's incremental mode, which lets you only include files modified after the previous backup. It will still not do the delta transfer of rsync, and several versions of files will take up disk space, though. On the other hand, a tarball is far simpler to compress efficiently (with xz or something) than a directory tree.

Answer 3

There's a registry setting determining whether the Windows kernel treats filenames as case-insensitive:

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\kernel\obcaseinsensitive

Set that to 0 and reboot to allow files differing only in case. See also http://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/using-specialnames.html#pathnames-casesensitive.

Cygwin 1.7 automatically maps characters such as : that aren't allowed in Windows filenames into the "Unicode private use area". The one big exception to this is the backslash, which it treats as a directory separator for the sake of Windows interoperability, so the only thing you can do about those is avoid them in Linux filenames, or of course use a different approach altogether.