On Wed, Apr 08, 2009 at 10:55:29AM -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
> 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.
> 
I think USB only works in the closed source version of VirtualBox.

If you decide to got the live cd route, you might want to try Ubuntu.
Version 8.10 comes with a nice and easy USB stick installer.  Sidux has
one, too.

-Rob

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