I’m using the bash on windows (WSL) every day now to take a snapshot of my unix-based web sites.
Given that most people have a windows machine with a huge disk, WSL is a great way to take a snapshot of unix directories using a familiar interface – rsync/ssh.
Here is a line from a backup script that runs under bash under windows.
/usr/bin/rsync -avz --delete ec2-1-2-3-4.compute.amazonaws.com:/home/bitnami/htdocs/ ~/backups/
This asks rsync to copy a directory off an EC2 directory, and mirror it locally.
rsync will use a profile entry in the ~/.ssh/config file to provide the ssh certificate at run time in order to login and encrypt the rsync session.
Host ec2-1-2-3-4.compute.amazonaws.com IdentityFile ~/.ssh/ec2-secret.pem User ubuntu
This shows rsync which .pem file to use to login to the EC2 instance.
It doesn’t run as fast as a pure linux box would but certainly fast enough for my purposes.
Loving WSL !