Achim J. Latz wrote:
> For my company Qustodium Internet Security, I am in the process of
> developing a VM appliance that will enable small (Windows-centric) networks
> to enjoy the benefits of BackupPC. 
> 
> Basically, the appliance runs BackupPC on top of a special Ubuntu version
> and will be very simple to configure. The draft announcement is available
> on the project web page [0].
> 
> Clearly QBA is covered by the GPL, based on its components such as Ubuntu
> JeOS, SetACL and BackupPC. Proprietary tools such as vshadow.exe and
> dosdev.exe (see below) are not necessary for QBA to work, but the user has
> the choice to obtain those tools separately from Microsoft and enhance
> QBA’s functionality significantly.
> 
> In addition to the above ease-of-use, QBA addresses some limitations stated
> in the BackupPC FAQ: 
> 
> * "Non-Unix file attributes not backed up"
> QBA uses SetACL [1] to backup and restore Windows NTFS access control lists
> for every file and directory. The ACLs are stored for every directory
> before the backup starts in a special file called BUGBUG, and upon restore
> that data is used to recreate the ACLs for the restored files only. In
> addition, QBA uses attrib.exe (part of every Windows installation) to
> backup and restore other file attributes such as System, Hidden, Archive or
> Read-Only.
> 
> * "Locked files are not backed up"
> QBA can make use of the Volume Shadow Copy Service that was introduced with
> Windows XP to copy even open files such as Outlook .PSTs mail stores. In
> order for this to work, the user has to provide his own copies of
> vshadow.exe (part of the Volume Shadow Copy Service SDK) and dosdev.exe
> (part of Microsoft Product Support's Reporting Tools), both of which are
> free downloads. Once these files have been obtained by the user and
> integrated via the available automated GUI process, QBA will use them
> without further configuration to copy locked files. At the moment, there is
> no GUI and the files have to be simply dropped into the correct folder of
> the virtual “configuration” HD.

It's a nice touch to glue all this together into an appliance, but do 
you have any documentation or helpful hints about adding the extra 
features into an existing backuppc installation?

> * "Don't expect to reconstruct a complete WinXX drive"
> Since QBA addresses both the ACL and locked files issue, it remains to be
> confirmed whether this is sufficient to reconstruct a complete Windows
> drive. We anticipate that at least master boot record, partition table,
> boot sector and boot loader need more investigation, but could potentially
> be solved via the dd tool, as outlined here [2].
> 
> Perhaps we could pool our interest in backing up ACLs and the registry (and
> potentially the MBR) for a full Windows Disaster Recovery option in
> BackupPC?

One approach that sort-of works is to use clonezilla to make image 
backups of windows hosts periodically.  These can be restored quickly to 
give a running machine where you can drop in the more current backuppc 
backup - but there is obviously overhead in time to do this and in 
storage space for the extra copy.  I've always thought that a small 
amount of scripting might make it possible to skip the image save.  That 
is, you'd need to run something on the target machines to save the 
partition/filesystem layout and boot sector into a file that backuppc 
would store in a form that clonezilla could use, then add code to 
clonezilla to recreate the filesystems and dump the tar image from 
backuppc onto it.  With the support for locked files, acls, and some 
registry hacks, this should work for windows too.

--
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell AT gmail DOT com


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