Thanks go to Phil Brennan for telling me about the particular build of rsync used here, both Phil and Des Traynor for proof reading, and Marten Veldthuis for helping to fix some technical errors.

Installing rsync

You need to download a Windows version of rsync. The best one I've found, in that it works, is called cwRsync. You can download the installer from Sourceforge.

Extracting the rsync installer to your desktop.

The installer is contained inside the zip file. You'll need to extract the installer before you can use it. Go to where you have downloaded the zip file, right-click on it and choose "Extract all...". A dialogue box will pop up; just click Next, Next and Finish.

Open up the new folder and double-click the installer. It's pretty standard stuff - if you've ever installed a Windows program before, you shouldn't have any problems. I recommend you install it into c:\cwRsync; the default location of c:\Program Files\cwRsync can cause some odd problems. For the rest of the article, I'm going to assume you've installed it to c:\cwRsync.

rsync is now installed. Now let's set up some environment variables to make everything work.

Configuring rsync

Go to the Control Panel and open up System (if you're not using the classic view, you can find it in the Performance and Maintenance section). Click on the Advanced tab, and at the bottom you should see a button labelled Environment Variables. Click on it.

You need to set up two environment variables. Firstly, you need to add the directory c:\cwRsync\bin to your path. You can do this by creating a new user environment variable called PATH and giving it the value c:\cwRsync\bin;%PATH%.

Click the top “New...” button to add a new user environment variable.

Adding c:\cwRsync\bin to your path.

In the same way, you need to add another user environment variable called RSYNC_RSH with the value ssh.exe. When you are finished, you should see something like this:

Both environment variables have been added.

If you do, click OK twice and move on. If not, leave a comment and I'll try to help.

Testing

Open up a command prompt with "Start", "Run..." and "cmd". Run the commands below, changing username to your Strongspace username and subdomain to your Strongspace subdomain. This command will create a directory called testrsync in your Strongspace, and upload the directory c:\cwRsync to it using rsync.

1. cd c:\
2. rsync -avz --delete "/cwRsync" username@subdomain.strongspace.com:testrsync

You'll be asked if you want to continue connection (type "yes" and hit enter) and then asked for your Strongspace password. Type that, hit enter, and you should see files begin to upload. Login to Strongspace and make sure the files from c:\cwRsync are there. If so, rsync is now working! If not, leave a comment.

Making your SSH keys

If you don't want to provide a password every time you use rsync, you can set up SSH keys. There's a good explanation of what these are at the PuTTY page on using public key authentication.

Make a new folder in your Strongspace Home account, named ".ssh". Open a new command prompt. You should be in your home directory (in my case, C:\Documents and Settings\David Barrett). If not, cd to it. Then run the following commands:

1. ssh-keygen -P "" -t dsa
2. cd .ssh
3. copy id_dsa.pub authorized_keys
4. cd ..
5. rsync -avz ".ssh/authorized_keys" username@subdomain.strongspace.com:.ssh/authorized_keys
6. del .ssh/authorized_keys

Now you don't need to type your password to use rsync.