Cygwin is a great tool for making a windows system usable. It supplies you with a linux-like environment (POSIX library) that runs on top of windows. Unfortunately, I still have a windows computer in my household (used only as a fileserver), so I rely on cygwin for basic computer commands (rsync, scp, ssh, etc). Here's a script I wrote to backup my iTunes and Photography directories to an external harddrive. Rsync is great because it can can do incremental secure copies!