I've been using cygwin rsync for my backups and I have now got it working smoothly. One problem that I came across was cygwin's attempts to map the Unix security model onto the Windows security model. I won't go into details on what it gets up to but I can summarise by saying that it is either broken or defaults to something that is useless. It is continually creating files with access permissions equivalent to chmod 000 i.e. nobody has any access to them.
The simple solution has been to declare the environment variable
CYGWIN=nontsec
which turns off the whizz bang nt security model and falls back to a simpler model which simply propogates the windows 'read-only' flag and makes no attempts to worry about owner, group or any of that jazz. This suits me for what I am doing.
Peter's Moblog
