Last night, Nicole needed to back up some important work documents on her Windows laptop. This seemed like a good time to look into iFolder, but I quickly noticed that they don’t offer .deb packages and the instructions for building and installing on Dapper looked like a bit of a nightmare.

Instead, I ended up setting up a Samba share for her on my Linux box. Samba seems to have a reputation for being a beast to configure, but I knew that Ubuntu came installed with Samba and GNOME has a “Shared Folders” panel that offers sharing via SMB. It wasn’t too bad, once I figured out that I needed to create a Samba user and password via the smbpasswd command (I didn’t see a way to do this in the GUI).

Now I’d like to set up an automated backup for her – I’m thinking that I’ll probably create a cron job for her in Cygwin.