I am trying to backup my files/folders from CentOS so that I don't lose all the web sites and data that has been collected.

I have been trying to find a way to setup rsync on Windows, and connect CentOS to Windows using rsync but I have had no luck being able to connect to it.

I am using a Virtual Machine Windows 11 to try and back up to, so there's no firewall / security on it.

I honestly do not know if rsync is even the way to go, I was looking at dump as well but read that's old and not as good..

please advise.

Update; I cannot mount the shared drive because I receive the error:
No match for argument: cifs-utils
Error: Unable to find a match: cifs-utils

I cannot install cifs-utils using dnf, yum is not installed and I cannot get it installed on my machine following any instructions I've found in the last few days.

I think Windows 11 has some kind of build in Linux (WOL?). Maybe get that running on your Windows Machine and use sshfs(1) to mount your Linux Filesystems.

Also, maybe there is a sshfs(1) application for Windows 11 ? THe other option is Flash Drives formatted on Windows.

Yes, Windows 10 and 11 include ssh according to their article:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/wi.../tutorials/ssh

I can SSH to my CentOS installation no problem, but I cannot mount my shared hard drive using cifs:

mount: unknown filesystem type 'cifs'

No match for argument: cifs-utils
Error: Unable to find a match: cifs-utils

..
Is there a way I can use my windows machine to log in and copy files to itself? I have tried many, many different methods to try and get cifs to work. (Google, first 2 pages of results or so) - A big issue I ran into there was that YUM does not work on my machine, just dnf - also apt-get doesn't work either.. Not sure if that's normal for CentOS 8 I never used it before.

apt-get is a package tool for debian and debian based distributions.

Try installing if not already samba, samba-common and samba-client packages. dnf is the latest and greatest package utility that replaced yum.

You can rsync from linux to Windows via samba but permissions and ownership are not "transferable".

I tried this.. I get this error for samba, samba-common and samba-client

You didn't mention this was a VPS. Doesn't cPanel provide some backup tools?

Oh, my apologies. It is indeed a VPS.
cPanel does not load , for some reason my host doesn't offer assistance with cPanel outside of CentOS 7. So, even if cPanel did backup things - I couldn't access it.

I think the easiest way to accomplish my goal is to backup the data from the CentOS server to my Windows machine.. I just can't figure out how to do that since I can't mount a cifs drive. or any, it seems.

You could download the RPM package from the CentOS repository but you have to also install all the dependencies.
Can you create an archive of your data and files and then transfer them to Windows?

I have tried, but I keep running into random errors regardless of what tactic I use.. Any advice?

This is the conclusion I came to as well. What I am running into, is I have very limited space on my VPS server - so I am trying to back it up to a Windows machine.
I cannot seem to wrap my mind around how to do this without mounting a shared drive from the Windows folder - I keep getting errors about cifs being an unknown file type.

I was wondering if I can connect to the CentOS machine from Windows and transfer that way, but I can't seem to figure that out either. I can connect via SSH no problem, but downloading to the windows machine.. HOW?! lol my brain is wrinkled

filezilla or WinSCP are Windows file transfer programs that can connect via sftp which is part of ssh.

This was resolved by using Putty + pscp on Windows with the command: pscp - P 22 username@host.com:/public_html/backup.tar c:\users\public\dl