Les Mikesell wrote:
> Jeffrey J. Kosowsky wrote:
>>  
>> One problem with ntfsclone is that as written, you need to run it from
>> Linux and mount the drive... but conceptually the idea of having
>> another program to back up the metada byte-by-byte while using the
>> pooling of BackupPC to save the file data sounds like the ideal. In
>> particular, accurate cloning of the metadata would make sure that you
>> captured all the subtleties of the filesystem while pooling maximizes
>> the efficiency of the data backup.
> 
> Maybe someone could come up with the minimal system that you'd have to 
> clone in a clonezilla image to get the magic filesystem stuff right, 
> then modify the clonezilla restore script to drop that in, then pull the 
> latest backup from backuppc via ssh and restore on top of it.  Likewise 
> for linux it would be nice to have backuppc store enough information 
> about the filesystem that clonezilla (or a similar live CD) could 
> reproduce the formatting and then restore the files.


Have been meaning to jump in on this conversation, but anyway, better
late than never...

In one instance, I've done the following:
Using the version of rsync which automatically uses vss to backup open
files (I'm not sure the exact details, but they have been posted to the
list previously), I do daily backups using rsyncd to backuppc.

On the actual backuppc system, there is an additional HDD which is not
used for linux/backuppc/etc. The hardware of this machine is identical
to the main windows server being backed up above.

At a single point in time, we did a installation of windows on this
extra HDD on the backuppc machine. I think the install was stopped at
the second windows reboot (ie, I don't think we actually
finished/completed the install).

Using partimage I took an image of this partition and saved it on the
backuppc drive.

The windows server has two partitions (cdrive and ddrive rsyncd shares).

Each night, we run a script which does the following (on the backuppc
server, the live server is only accessed by backuppc - rsyncd for backups):
1) Make sure the windows 'cdrive' is not mounted
2) restore the partimage file to the partition
3) mount the partition in linux
4) backuppc restore the most recent backup to the cdrive using
BackupPC_tarCreate .... | tar -xf -
5) umount the 'cdrive'
6) Check the 'ddrive' is not mounted
7) mkntfs the 'ddrive' partition
8) mount 'ddrive'
9) backuppc restore the most recent backup to the ddrive using
BackupPC_tarCreate .... | tar -xf -
10) umount the ddrive

In our testing so far, everything seems to work perfectly, except we
need to "re-activate" MS Windows within 3 days of booting the machine.
Generally we just do our testing without re-activating windows, and also
we don't want to re-activate too many times or it may not work when we
need it to.

I realise this doesn't save all the permissions/ACL's/etc, but it
produces a fully functional machine complete with MS Exchange server.
(We also do a MS Exchange backup which is backed up into backuppc in
case the exchange DB is corrupted or was not in a reliable state when we
happened to backup).

From the sounds of it, adding the subinacl backup should be useful in my
situation to preserve the additional information, though it doesn't seem
to be important to get the system up and running again and to preserve
the data.

Please see the script attached, and let me know if you have any
suggestions for improvement.

Regards,
Adam

-- 
Adam Goryachev
Website Managers
www.websitemanagers.com.au

clean_image.sh
Description: Bourne shell script

signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature

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