You don't need anything else than ssh (more exactly, scp) when both machines are running Linux (or some other unix). Just use 'scp -r backup@backupmachine:/var/BACKUP /var' or something. The key thing will happen automatically; and if you use a dedicated 'backup' user, this is a quite secure solution.

I don't know anything about windows, except that it won't natively interact with any open, non-MS technology. I guess there must be some third-party programs with similar functionality. Perhaps openssh itself, with cygwin...

Cheers. How does the key thing happen automaticaly? i have a key file for the machine, do i need to copy this to any specific directory? i realy want this copy to run overnight (non-interactivly), so i don't want it asking for passwords or locations of key files.

On a unix box you achive this by the cron daemon. The documentation how to use it you can find with: man crontab.

Simple summary:

challenge-response authentication.

Generate your ssh-keys with <ssh-keygen -d> for ssh2.

You will have the files $HOME/.ssh/id_dsa.pub and $HOME/.ssh/id_dsa.

The id_dsa.pub - file is your public key. Copy that file to the target
+ to
$HOME/.ssh/machinename.pub and do a
"cd .ssh; cat machinename.pub >>authorized_keys".

Now you should be able to connect to the target
machine via ssh without using passwords.
[download]

Cygwin is pretty good anyway. You can get a complete OpenSSL and OpenSSH suite for Cygwin, and it's works well enough.

If you are adicted to a GUI then PuTTY is pretty good, and includes a nice SSH terminal tool, and a set of batch-able command line tools.

You should also be able to get various SSH tools for Perl from CPAN, but I've not used them, and I don't know if they are easy to get for Windows either.


--
ajt