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Using Linux for Windows HD Snapshots?
DBordello asks: "Our company is currently backing up weekly to tape. I would like to begin taking snapshots of our NT 4.0 server. My first thought was a Linux box running an Open Source solution. My research shows that most Open Source applications to take snapshots assume that the backup target is Linux based. This presents a problem with mounting the NT 4.0 server. While I could mount the share with Samba, all of the backup applications do not provide options to backup a local mount. What do you guys use to snapshot your Windows network?"
hdup should do the job. Simple, does monthly/weekly/daily and compression + encryption if you wish.
Mount your NT filesystem via samba, specify your mounted directories to backup, put a crontab entry, that should be it.
I use it daily to store a backup file on a the same host as the filesystem backuped - then fetching it using rsync with another machine for archival purposes.
Won't keep NT permissions automatically, you should backup relevant permission files for Windows (anybody knows what they are?)
with a camera, of course.
Linux has a driver for NTFS already. Last time I looked, it was read-only, but that should suit you perfectly.
I don't know how far you have researched this, but if you are running RedHat Linux 7.x, 8.0, or 9 you already have a solution with Amanda.
Backup of Microsoft Windows machines happens via Samba shares of course, and it will run in agent or agentless mode.
Agent mode of course gives you things like bandwidth throttling and compression of the network bandwidth usage. Agentless mode and you can back up anything you can mount.
Typically you can have it use the smbtar(1) command (from Samba) to have it backup your windows machine.
The program isn't debugged until the last user is dead.
With dd you can make a "snap shot" of any imaginable partition. No need to mount it. Just write dd if=/dev/hdc10 of=/root/backups/hdc10-`date -Is` or something similar, and it's done. I wish you good luck.
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
No local mounts. Oops, sorry.
No. It just means that you have to make a partition of at least the same size on the new hard drive, as on the old one. The new hard drives are usually larger, so it's not a problem at all. First use dd to back up the partition and record it on a new hard drive using fdisk (or cfdisk if yu cannot use a simple CLItool) first to make a new partition of the same type and size, and then dd again to write the actual data. It's just that simple.
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
You could at least try to be on topic, you know. Saying something like, use dd and your hard drive images will last as long as Strom Thurmond. Or, you need to keep your Windows backups segregated from your Linux backups, just like Strom Thurmond would have done. C'mon, try it, it's fun.
Not that I've used it extensively yet (maybe someone else has) but Ghost 4 Unix (g4u) will do a bit for bit copy just like Ghost for Windows does, difference being that it is freeware and backs up to any ftp server with the appropriate credentials added. I think I'll go ahead and try it a little more this weekend actually.
Here is a link to g4u.
Cliff
sigs are like a box of chocolates, they all suck remove the underscores to email me
It is the "tape archiver", after all. ...or--if you prefer--BRU, star, or some other tar relative.
Combine with compression programs such as gzip, bzip2, compress, etc., as needed.
rinse, lather, repeat.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I am currently facing the same problem; here is my solution:
A couple of weeks ago, I convinced my boss to let me replace our entire windows network (workstations; all servers are *nix) with diskless Linux workstations (Gentoo/OpenOffice/Evolution/Mozilla), all participating in a big happy openmosix cluster!!!
(our builds will be speedy-speedy now!!!)
So, my backup procedure will be:
Step 1)back up the NFS server with the users' home dirs
Step 2)Drink BEER!!!!
Keep the inteligent posts segregated from the trolls dammit!
I touch computers in naughty places
Is that some kind of joke?
If the new hard drive is smaller then obviously you cannot write more data than what would fit. Isn't that obvious? If you want to move 40GB of backed up data to 30GB hard disk you are out of luck, no matter if you use dd or anything else. It's just a pigeon hole principle, pure and simple.
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
For the sake of simplicity I haven't piped it through gzip (or bzip2 for that matter) in my example. After all, it was only an example, for god's sake!
Yes, and people who are fast enough to win a marathon are obviously fast enough to not win the marathon. Very insightful thought indeed, however off-topic (*cough*moderators*cough*) it might be.
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
BackupPC.
Partimage makes an "intelligent" copy of a partition. I.e., it only copies the sectors that actually contain data. This gives a smaller backup than a full copy of the disk.
It can read NTFS partitions, and it can connect to a remote server to store the file.
They even provide bootable disk images, so you can use it without installing Linux on the NT machine.
WWTTD?
The most kind and humane solution is to give the Windows box a "snap" shot from a .45 magnum. Stops its suffering short.
www.amanda.org
running via the cygwin port. A bit klunky but works for our servers.
All user data is *NOT* kept on the desktop so I don't about backing up the workstations.
NetBackup ?
Maybe Ghost for Unix is what you need ?
http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/
"g4u ("ghost for unix") is a NetBSD-based bootfloppy/CD-ROM that allows easy cloning of PC harddisks to deploy a common setup on a number of PCs using FTP. The floppy/CD offers two functions. First is to upload the compressed image of a local harddisk to a FTP server. Other is to restore that image via FTP, uncompress it and write it back to disk; network configuration is fetched via DHCP. As the harddisk is processed as a image, any filesystem and operating system can be deployed using g4u. Easy cloning of local disks is also supported. "
We installed cygwin on our NT box. In addition, we are running sshd on it. At night, our backup box ssh's in an and runs tar to grab what it needs.
very simple... and works.
Chief
After a few hours of your post you will just have to let the NT4 servers go , wont you :)
The lunatic is in my head
you dont!
:-)
OP : Look into Drive Image by PowerQuest.
It is amazing, does exactly what you want, fits on a DOS7 boot floppy (make a boot floppy from a Win9x machine) and is really a great tool.
Only caveat : you have to have multiple partitions, and the partition you are writing the drive image to must be recognized by DOS7 (Win9x) ie. FAT or FAT32.
I generally build my machines with this in mind, my main partition is generally NTFS with a FAT32 partition large enough to hold the one I want to back up - Drive Image generally gives 50% compression, plus or minus.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
Has anybody experiences with Bacula? An NT client is available, the server side is on **ix.
:-)
Just found it today, so I can't give any comments, but at least their claim is cool:
"It comes by night and sucks the vital essence from your computers."
Especially interesting would ba a comparison to Amanda.
Bye egghat.
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
http://unattended.sourceforge.net/
Not sure if it is what you are searching for though (it would not backup data)
I live in Soviet Canuckistan you insensitive clod!
http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
BackupPC is what we use. It works with both Windows and Unix, and lets you view the archives through a web interface (matter of fact, you can control any aspect of the backup process via web OR command line, for users or scripts, however you prefer)
You can specify how many backups to keep and when to start deleting.
For each backup, it later goes through and compares files with the last backup. If any match, it removes the file and makes a hard link to the old file to save disk space.
Check it out
Well, as you have seen from the previous posts, the term snapshots is interpretted differently by different people.
If you mean an image of the disk, when you say snapshot, then you will have to use something like partimage or ghost4unix. These will require that the NT4 server be shut down while the image is taken. The Norton Ghost for Servers can do live images.
If you mean you want a point in time copy of the server's files, when you say snapshot, then Rsync is your friend, with Samba client. Look at this how-to for a quick and easy Rsync based rolling snapshot backup. The only problem with this method is that you will lose the NTFS permission attributes on the backed up files.
OK, we actually have only Linux/Samba/NFS boxes doing all fileserving, so we use rsync to replicate data to our hot-spare, but since rsync is available for windows (thanks to cygwin), it's no problem to use natively.
You will lose ACLs, but you can do what we do (we use ACLs on XFS), dump them to file just before you run your snapshot (we use getfacl, but you could use the cacls tool on NT), allowing your file dump of the ACLs to be synced also. You can then apply the ACLs either after you have restored.
The other option is unison, which also has a native version for windows, with the optional GTK GUI. It may be better for other environments where you need 2-way replication.
I didn't investigate every backup program recommended here, but the ones I looked at do NOT back up the Microsoft Windows registry. Nor do they back up open files, some of which are important. Case in point: the ".pst" file used by Microsoft Outlook.
If you do network backups and ignore these problems, you are stupid.
How was summer camp? Did you make any baskets?
cygwin dd netcat => network => netcat dd linux
And knowing is half the battle!
why not use some native windows program than can be run as a terminal service or maybee even make one that makes an image of the windows system, compresses it, and saves it on a network share. would this not serve the same purpose and also keep windows file permissions with NTFS?
then..um...take the tape and put it in a linux box to....um...have an open source "solution"
What do you guys use to snapshot your Windows network?
Well, right before I got fired, I used a Canon G2 digital camera. I used to use a Fugi Finepix, but it didn't give me enough control over my Windows Snapshots. So one day our mail server dies, and my boss asks for me snapshots, and I brought them to him on a 128MB CF flash card. I still can't figure out why I got fired tho.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
I wanted a linux solution, so put together a couple of simple perl programs to do the job. I see now from a previous post that partimage may do mostly the same thing and a whole lot more, but maybe these will be useful to someone. Each script takes as an argument a block device and a directory, and either backups up the block device to a collection of files in the given directory, or restores from that directory. In addition, when backing-up, an MD5 checksum is generated and stored for each chunk of partition read. My idea was that the restore program would only restore "blocks" for which the MD5 checksum generated from the current disk contents didn't match the checksum for the backed-up "blocks". Of course the program has to read the disk on restore to generate the current MD5 contents, but I speculated it might still come out faster if the disk content was relatively unchanged from the previous restore, which was often the situation I faced (all that changed was the result of installing the latest build, for instance).
I've used it dozens of time successfully; but there's no warranty. I don't know how efficient it is; it seems to me that relatively little time is spent doing IO, which must be a bad sign. I never looked into it further though. I planned to add support for incremental backups too - i.e. store in a directory backup2 only backups of the blocks that differ from those in backup1 - so providing an easy way to have several disk images that share common disk blocks (e.g. one base install, another with Visual Studio, etc.) It should be easy to do. Anyway, these files are in the public domain.
Its priced reasonable, and is made for this sort of thing..
Dont push a round peg in a square hole..
I presume you can run the mulitcast server under wine and still use your linux server...
---- Booth was a patriot ----