Backup Central

This assumes that the files that MS Windows keeps locked
do not change over time. I do not do Windows so I do not know.

I think the most important file that falls in this category is the
Windows registry, which changes with just about every software
installation and/or configuration change.

Another important type of file would be things like Outlook mail files
(.pst) that are often left open the entire time the PC is on--but there
are workarounds for backing those up. The registry and other system
files are the big obstacle to doing a full Windows restore.

One idea for the registry might be to find a way to backup and restore
the extra copy of the registry that Windows keeps around, which might
give you a "recent" version if not the latest, but I'm not sure that
would work or what would be required to make that happen. I'm also not
sure if that extra copy of the registry is kept open just like the real
copy.

For the actual restore, in many cases I think you could use a live Linux
CD (a customized version of Knoppix, for example) for that. The Windows
live CD might be helpful if for some reason the client had to be a
Windows machine to get the necessary connectivity to the backuppc
server.



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At 06:57 PM 4/9/2004 -0500, mtrisko wrote:
This assumes that the files that MS Windows keeps locked
do not change over time. I do not do Windows so I do not know.

I think the most important file that falls in this category is the
Windows registry, which changes with just about every software
installation and/or configuration change.
<SNIP>

Just adding my 2 cents. On the XP systems that I back up I have a
scheduled task running to dump the system state every day at 5PM. This way
a relatively recent version of the registry and important drivers (or
important in M$ mind) are dumped. The file us usually anywhere from 250
to 500 MB.

The schedule task is:

C:\WINDOWS\system32\ntbackup.exe backup " < at > C:\Documents and
Settings\Marty\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Windows
NT\NTBackup\data\system state.bks" /n "systemstate.bkf created 1/5/2004 at
9:56 AM" /d "Set created 1/5/2004 at 9:56 AM" /v:no /r:no /rs:no /hc:off /m
normal /j "system state" /l:s /f "C:\systemstate.bkf"

I just let the wizard guide me through it. Supposedly I should be able to
use to this to restore from. (Not that I've had to try)

Marty




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Marlin Prowell writes:

At 11:28 AM 4/9/2004 -0600, Robert George Mayer wrote:
You cannot make a full backup of Windows in
the first place...
Perhaps from a bootable CD? Can you use networking from the CD?

Yes, you can.

What you are suggesting, it seems, is to create a BartPE CD with a rsync
client or smbclient on it. To create a complete backup, you'd have to:

- boot client machine with CD that has special BackupPC client
- go to BackupPC server and immediately initiate a full backup
- when the backup is done, reboot client machine back into Windows

IMHO, not very automatic, and not very scalable. One great asset of
BackupPC is that "it just works!"

One problem, however, is that ACLs don't get backed up, so they
won't get restored.

But I agree: the long term vision is to be able to bare metal
recovery with BackupPC. It probably can be done for *nix (again,
without ACLs). Some time ago Les has posted some instructions
using a knoppix bootable linix cd.

In the future I'd like to be able to restore using client-pull,
rather than server-push. (Client push backups would be nice
too). For example, BackupPC could emulate an rsync server. That
way you could boot a knoppix cd, and you wouldn't need perl,
BackupPC, ssh setup or anything on the client. You would just
run an rsync command like:

rsync -aH BackupPCServer::moduleName /path/to/emtpy/disk

ModuleName could contain the client name, share name and backup number.
There would have to be some way of specifying the password; perhaps
the CGI could be used to "turn on" rsynd for a specific client and
a specific time period (eg: only listens for X minutes, only serves
up a specific client backup, accepts connections from a specific IP).
BackupPC listens for and serves the request; it's not a real rsyncd on
the server.

Josh Marshall mentioned doing something like this for tar restore too.
In this case there is no security: BackupPC would just export a tar
file to a specific tcp port. The client would connect to the tcp
port and pipe the data into tar -xf.

Note also that BackupPC's rsync doesn't support hardlinks (tar does).
That's on the File::RsyncP todo list.

For WinXX, a bare metal restore requires a lot of new things (mainly
backing up locked files, and adding backup and restore of ACLs).
I don't know how to do this, but I'd like to get there one day.

Craig


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On Fri, 2004-04-09 at 12:55, Wayne Scott wrote:
From: Marlin Prowell <mbp < at > cadalog-inc.com>
What you are suggesting, it seems, is to create a BartPE CD with a rsync
client or smbclient on it. To create a complete backup, you'd have to:

Actually what he is saying is that IF we could backup all files on a
Windows machine, then you chould use one of these CD's to do a full
_restore_ to a machine that has a completely blank harddrive.

You could use a bootable Linux CD with network support (knoppix,
etc.) to make a full disk or partition image copy of a windows
system periodically and restore that for disaster recovery
before restoring the current backuppc data. I'm inclined to
think the effort is better spent moving your applications to
a more sensible operating system so you don't have to do that
kind of nonsense because the API's you need are kept secret.

---
Les Mikesell
les < at > futuresource.com




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