INSTALLATION: Thank you for trying rdiff-backup on Windows. Native support for the Windows environment is quite new in rdiff-backup. Please read the manual page, FAQ and the Wiki thorougly. To install the provided binary, simply copy rdiff-backup.exe to someplace in your PATH. Everything is included in the binary (including Python) for local operation. For remote operation, you will need to install a Windows SSH program. You will also need to install rdiff-backup on the remote system(s). You will need the Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 redistributables. If these are not installed on your system, rdiff-backup will be unable to run and Windows will display a message such as "The system cannot execute the specified program". To install the redistributables for all users, install the package available from Microsoft.com (search for "visual c 2008 redistributable"). Alternatively, you can install the redistributable in a "side-by-side" configuration, which does not require administrator privelges. Simply download the DLL package from: http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/rdiff-backup/Microsoft.VC90.zip and copy the four enclosed files to the same directory as rdiff-backup.exe. You will need to follow either method only once. ADDITIONAL ISSUES: Currently, rdiff-backup's --include and --exclude options do not support Windows paths with \ as the directory separator. Instead, it is necessary to use / which is the Unix directory separator. Additionally, you may need to run rdiff-backup from the same directory as the source of your backup, eg: > cd c:\ > rdiff-backup.exe --include "c:/My Stuff" --exclude "c:/**" c:/ c:/Backup will work to backup "c:\My Stuff" to "c:\Backup", but: > cd "c:\My Stuff" > rdiff-backup.exe --include "c:/My Stuff" --exclude "c:/**" c:/ c:/Backup will not work. UPDATE: With appropriate escaping, it looks like it is possible for this to work. Follow this example: > mkdir c:\foo > cd "c:\Documents and Settings" > rdiff-backup.exe --include c:\\/foo --exclude c:\\/** c:\/ c:\bar The \\ is necessary in the --include and --exclude options because those options permit regular-expressions, and \ is the escape character in regular-expressions, and thus needs to be escaped itself. TROUBLESHOOTING: If you have everything installed properly, and it still doesn't work, see the enclosed manual, FAQ, the web page at http://rdiff-backup.nongnu.org, the Wiki at: http://wiki.rdiff-backup.org, and/or the mailing list. You can subscribe to the mailing list at: http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/rdiff-backup-users Recommended Wiki entries: http://wiki.rdiff-backup.org/wiki/index.php/BackupFromWindowsToLinux You can also try searching the mailing list archives: http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/rdiff-backup-users/