Thomas Karcher wrote:
>
>> I'm looking for something that can be fired up easily on a
>> windows/mac 
>> without much concern for its physical hardware, so I don't think Xen
>> is 
>> a good fit.  I do have a dual-boot laptop - but it spends much of its 
>> time in the same building as the data being backed up and I'd like a 
>> plan that only needs the offsite disk and perhaps an image on a CD or 
>> DVD that is likely to run anywhere.
> 
> It doesn't matter which VM technology you choose - the network block
> device is the main idea.
> 
> But perhaps I miss the point: You want to run a "desaster recovery"
> backuppc instance, right?

I don't want to "maintain" a disaster recovery instance or require it to 
exist in any particular place - I want to be able to spin up a virtual 
machine on any available hardware that can access my spare disk copy via 
a USB adapter and be restoring files in a few minutes.

 > You will have to do this in a *nix
> environment, since you need to read your backuppc repository filesystem
> with hard links. Whether you do that in a VM or on a physical machine
> doesn't matter I guess. So you have two tasks: Make such a desaster
> recovery system running, and get your last working backuppc repository
> to it. If you have a physical machine, it's a matter of connecting and
> mounting.

I have a physical machine in the form of a dual-boot laptop, but it is 
the one I use daily in the same building as the data being backed up, so 
it's probably not a good idea to expect it to survive a disaster.

> If you have a VM, all I'm saying is: I have good experience
> with nbd. And as far as I know, there is a NBD server for windows, but I
> didn't look much into it. This way, you could "export" your USB disk
> from a windows machine and "import" = mount it from any nbd-capable *nix
> machine on the same network.

It might also work to re-spin one of the live linux CD distributions 
that auto-detect most common hardware, but a VM sounds easier.  Both 
Virtualbox and the current vmware server/player claim to work with USB 
2.0 but I haven't done any speed tests yet - in fact I haven't been able 
to get virtualbox to see usb drives at all.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell AT gmail DOT com


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