Hi I have written a backup program in Python on Linux. It is a large project (for just one programmer, me ) and it is over 30.000 lines of code.

I am porting this program to windows, (i use win7) and mostly it work quite nice on windows already. But ofcourse windows and linux differ and i would really appreciate some help from people knowing either win-programming and or Python.

So I have te following questions:

1. How do I read locked files on windows, like the registry files?
2. How do i write to locked files on windows, like the registry?
3. How do i read/write to locked directories on windows?
4. Which files/directories should never be backed-up or restored? (Stuff like swap-files etc.)
5. Is there a windows version of os.stat.st_mode?? I know windows use acl's and these are quite complicated. But I only want to read or write permissions on a file or directory. Maybe there is simple way of doing this?
6. How do I put username/groupname etc. etc. on win-files?

I know this a lot to ask and I should RTFM, but this stuff is complicated and I want to do it right. So pointers to documentation and stuff I should read are very much appreciated.

A lot of thanks in advance.