[rdiff-backup-users] Major Problems With Cygwin Install

[Richard Steven Hack]

After long research today on how to install rdiff-backup and get it 
working on Cygwin, I did the following:

1) Downloaded and installed Cygwin on my Windows XP machine, as normal.
   All went well with that.

2) Downloaded and installed the following packages from Cygwin for the
   benefit of librsync:

   1) mingw-zlib
   2) mingw-bzip2
   3) popt
   4) libtool
   5) gettext (for popt)

3) Downloaded the Fedora Core 5 librsync-0.9.7-7.fc5.src.rpm.

4) Extracted the source tarball from the above and the patch
   librsync-0.9.7.lfs_overflow.patch

5) Extracted the source from the source tarball to its directory, copied
   the patch in.

6) Ran the patch command, which exited successfully.

7) Ran configure, make, make install to build librsync.

8) Downloaded rdiff-backup-1.1.5.tar.gz and extracted it to its
   directory.

9) Acquired the rpath-fsync.patch from
   http://katastrophos.net/andre/blog/?p=19 to fix the fsynch call.

10) Copied the patch to the rdiff-backup directory under the main
    rdiff-backup directory.

11) Ran the patch, exited successfully.

12) Changed to the main rdiff-backup directory.

13) Ran: python setup-py install

14) Ran rdiff-backup -V - got the version response.

15) Did the following command:

    rdiff-backup J:/Download I:/Backup

16) Rdiff backed up the files quickly, and got them all.

17) Ran the following command:

    rdiff-backup -r now I:/Backup J:/Download/Work2

18) Result:  Fatal Error: Could not find rdiff-backup repository at 
I:/Backup

Any ideas what went wrong?

By the way, during an earlier attempt to get it to work, I did the
following command:

rdiff-backup J:/Download I:

It didn't like that since I: is a partition, not a directory.

Unfortunately it had my Music Videos directory on it - and proceeded to 
wipe it out... Now I have to restore 60GB of stuff from my backup 
DVDs...and since I haven't done a backup in a couple months, basically 
I've lost a few which will be hard to replace.  Thank you, rdiff-backup!

I was testing rdiff-backup because I would like to use it to backup a 
client's video files - which are very large - in a diff manner which 
would save a lot of disk space and permit restoring the files to points 
in time if video editing went awry during the day's processing.

However, the number of bug reports and the difficulty in getting this to 
work has soured me on that concept - under Windows and Cygwin, at least, 
I feel the product is simply not ready for prime time - which is a 
shame, because the product is absolutely unigue. I don't think there are 
ANY Windows backup products that do a differential backup and point in 
time restores. There are a couple products that talk about differential 
backups but they never mention point in time diff restores, so I suspect 
they are rsync-like but not rdiff-backup-like.

I'd really like to get this working if anybody has any ideas why rdiff 
won't recognize it's own backup directory...