>I don't think I explained my question properly.
>If a hard drive failed I would have to:
>
>Format the new system drives
>Install the operating system
>Restore the registry settings
>Restore network connections and passwords
>Restore installed software
>Restore user data
>
>From what I know I would only be able to restore the user data from a
>backup. ...
I don't do PC's (the phrase "over my dead body" is appropriate), but my
understanding is that your sequence is basically correct.
There are two issues. First is that Amanda is just a wrapper on top
of Samba for PC work. Samba does not provide a ground zero bootstrap
(and it shouldn't -- that's outside it's intended use), so therefore
Amanda does not either.
Second is that even Samba doesn't do everything w.r.t. PC backups.
The two areas it has problems with are open files, the registry
in particular, and access control lists.
The former would require a client (PC) side program to interact with
the Windows backup API (if you can figure it out), or some other
tricks (a Windows "at" job that backs up the file to a temp place
that Amanda/Samba then grab -- restoring is left as an exercise for
the reader). The latter would require a change to the tar image format
(or tricks to that effect), and since tar is a POSIX standard, you can
guess how likely that is.
So at the moment, Amanda/Samba can sort of back up user data (minus ACL's)
and that's about it. I guess you can have it back up other things,
but with all the magic that goes on with Windows, I wouldn't want to bet
that just dropping the bits back in place is sufficient to make it work.
What really needs to happen is some fool, errr, Windows programmer, will
have to figure out how to write a backup program from scratch that can
deal with every dark, undocumented, misdocumented, Microsoft bizarity
and talk to Amanda. I'm not holding my breath.
>Martin Mitchell.
John R. Jackson, Technical Software Specialist, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
