Martin,
I have trained my userbase to value their documents, things that they
have invested hours in, more than their settings. My service guarantee is
limited to restoring data/documents if they have persisted 24hrs, and
restoring to our default settings, all tools they were licensed for. The
restoring of their desktop machine environment is time intensive for the
Sysads (me).
There are ways to backup the Windows environment info, e.g. use a script
on each host to backup the registry to a file in the share you will be
backing up. Winnt has 'repair' info, useful when restoring a machine (and
keep current 'Repair Disk'). Amanda restoring windows hosts is by no
means automatic. If you have a scripted install which will create the
shares/access required to run smbclient from the Amanda server, you would
still have to interact until you established standard parameters to pass
to the command.
Experiment with smbtar, or interactively, smbclient using tar, and you
will have a better understanding of Amanda's Windows relationship.
There are closed-source packages which will run on UX servers and which
ship with Windows clients, which may provide 'restore from boot'
capability.
Tony Traylor.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Original Message <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
On 11/22/00, 2:07:16 PM, John "R." Jackson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote regarding Re: General question :
> >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]
