Relative Difficulty

The other day, at work, we were working on setting up an automated qurk-and-dirty back up for some files from one Linux box to another. The link was a long distance one (from a data center in Dallas to our office in Anchorage). The solution was simple and elegant:

On the host being backed up:

tar -cv  /etc|bzip2 -9 -c | ssh -i /path/to/id_rsa user@backuphost.com \
"(cat > /path/to/backup.tar.bz2)" 

Tar up the files, pipe it through bzip2, pipe the output of bzip2 through SSH, which connects to the remote host via a keyed login, and output the result of that stream to a file on the other side.

Any idea how much contortion you’d have to go through to do the same thing on Windows? Difficulty: assume no use of SSH, and no interactive login (i.e. must be able to run completely unattended).

I asked my programming lead that question, and he said, “An order of a magnitude more.”

“Only one order?”

“I said OR MORE. OR MORE with windows always means MORE.”

Edit: Yes, run unattended, not unintended. Although I like cubiculum’s comment on reddit: “Windows does that sort of thing all the time.”