On Wed, 2005-07-27 at 13:12, Claude Jones wrote:
> >
> > Neither of these will do bare-metal restores of windows clients, but
> > can save data files via samba - and with backuppc you have the option
> > of using rsync.
> >
>
> Which leads me to ask, is there any opensource software that WILL do bare
> metal restores? I currently use Acronis for a lot of backup chores in my
> Windows part of the world - it's using Linux in at least part of its
> operations, as one can easily see if one deliberately causes an error while
> booted from their CD recovery disc. I'm not sure what they're doing when they
> run backups while booted up in Windows, which they can do. They say that they
> will also backup Linux drives, but I haven't tried that.
On the linux side it is relatively easy to do by hand given a
run-from-CD distribution like Knoppix and access to tar images
via ssh (which backuppc provides even though they aren't stored
that way). You just fdisk/mkfs somewhat similar partitions, drop
the contents back, then adjust /etc/fstab if you changed partition
devices or labels and make the disk bootable with lilo or grub.
For Windows, it's probably best to keep an image backup (Ghost, etc.)
to drop in first, then update by restoring a current file based
backup. There are some utilities to do raw-image backups under
Linux but I don't think any understand resizing NTFS partitions
as well as Ghost when the destination drive isn't exactly the same
as the source.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
