Re: Sync two ~/Mail directories on Windows?

[Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com>]

Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE (Kai Großjohann) writes:

> (Potential off-topic alert.)
> 
> Suppose you have two computers, both running Windows (98SE, say) and
> you want to use Gnus to read mail on them.  Most of the time, you use
> the desktop machine, but a few times a week you want to use the laptop
> instead.  The laptop has sufficient disk space, so you want a full
> copy of ~/Mail (and other files such as ~/.newsrc.eld and so on).
> 
> It is not practical to just transfer the whole ~/Mail directory every
> time, it being 600MB or so and the transfer takes quite a while even
> on fast ethernet...
> 
> On a Unixish system, life is simple: use rsync in one direction before
> traveling and in the other direction after traveling.  Problem solved.
> 
> But on a Windows system?
> 
> Does the `briefcase' feature do the trick?  Or is it possible to get
> rsync to work on Windows (both client and server side!)?  Or maybe
> even dump/restore, with incremental dumps?
> 
> It seems that GNU tar has a feature to ignore old files -- that could
> be used, perhaps.
> 
> (The mail backend is nnml, so I guess it is not necessary to be able
> to transfer file diffs; just transferring the new files ought to be
> sufficient.)

In addition to cygwin you may want to check out Uwin.  A package
developed by David Korn or ksh fame.   Have a look at:
http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/uwin/

and below for handy list of the utils and tools included.

http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/uwin/utilities.html

FAQ here: 
http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/uwin/faq.html