Hi Guys,

I have an old PC I want to build with Windows 2000 or 2003 server to play around with to increase my skills which I may use at work.

I thought a nifty thing I could do would be to setup the network so that when I connect through airport that the server picks up and compares my home folder, photos and other documents and then copies new ones onto it.

Obviously after this I would backup periodically onto DVD or such.

Is this possible at all?

It is possible, but you'd need to do it through some clever tricks and scripting.
Getting the machine to recognize that the network connection is present would be the difficult part. After that it's just a basic copy process.

Are you wanting to do the auto-copy on a mac, or a PC?

Scripting shouldn't be a problem, I am a decent programmer.

I want to auto copy onto the PC. My powerbook is my main machine, I want to backup onto 2003 server most likely (if I can get work to pay for a copy) which will be permanently in my house.

I'm not worried about the speed of the transfer, so 802.11b is fine, I would maybe transfer a max of 500meg a day (unless I start getting into basic video editing) and it can be doing this all night.

Pseduo code would be

1. Flag that powerbook has joined the network
2. Compare files
3. Copy new files over

I might look into active directory and mac connectivity today, but if anyone has any other ideas, feel free to throw them my way!

Obviously AppleScripts/Automator is the cheapest way to go, I just thought I'd throw this in the bag: Dantz Retrospect can do this as well. You install the app onto the Windows server and a client onto your Mac; and set up the source, destination and file selectors.

Then instead of setting a schedule for backup once a day or week, you set up a 'proactive backup' script where you specify 'fuzzy' settings, so you could set it to back up once a day, but also specify at least every 24 hours, and set the client preference from 'according to schedule' to 'immediately'.

Then if your Mac is visible on the network it will be backed up, but if it goes more than 24 hours without a backup the next time it connects to the network it will be backed up immediately.

You have to pay for it as it's a commercial program, though...

Cheers

Definitely possible. You can parse the output from ifconfig to make sure you have an IP address (ie, you're on the network), then ping your Windows box (making sure you're on the RIGHT wireless network), then copy the files using whichever method you prefer. I'd use a Linux/BSD server rather than Windows as Windows is just so horrible at doing anything server-related unless you install extra software. I'm a total rsync whore though, so feel free to ignore me.