Rsync and Windows?
Many corporate and heterogeneous networks use the rsync protocol to perform server backups or to keep files synchronized automatically from one or more directories on different machines. Linux natively incorporates the rsync utility and other associated tools, but what do you do when you need to backup Windows folders automatically from a NAS or a remote machine? One option could be to use Samba to read the contents of those folders from Linux, but it would be a fairly complex solution, because it would force us to configure Samba on the server side, set the various permissions and configuration options in Windows and place both machines on the same local network or configure complex rules on our firewall to allow SMB/CIFS traffic. And yet, the file transfer through the network would not be safe, because it would be made text clear with no encryption.