Michael Stowe wrote at about 10:40:04 -0600 on Monday, March 8, 2010: > > On Sat, 6 Mar 2010, Michael Stowe wrote: > > > >> > >> Out of necessity, I had an opportunity to try out restoring a system > >> from > >> scratch with nothing but BackupPC backups. I'm happy to report that the > >> process works, with a few limitations and quirks. > >> > >> I've documented it here: > >> > >> http://www.goodjobsucking.com/?p=219 > > > > How does this handle ACL's and file owernship and permissions and the > > like? > > > > Mike > > Not ... wonderfully. On the plus side, it does seem to handle the "read > only" flag, but it seems to lose the "system" and "hidden" flags.
Well, I imagine that is understandable since backuppc doesn't handle acl's and only does unix-like permissions. > As for ownership and permissions, I'm afraid I can't be certain. On the > one hand, they *seem* fine, but I'm not sure if that's because they were > preserved or if that happens to be the default. I'm not doing anything > fancy with either. Although I haven't tested it on a bare metal restore, I believe that my code that runs subinacl (and also optionally getfacl) to back up the Windows ACL's should take care of all file ownership, permissions, and ACLs (note that 'getfacl' only captures a subset of the full Windows acl's). Of course, beyond that there are other potential NTFS 'features' that might not get restored such as junctions, alternative data streams, etc. -- though typically they are rare in WinXP. Thanks for the write-up - very helpful! Couple of questions: 1. Once you have installed cygwin, why not just use rsync to restore rather than first creating a tar archive? 2. Is the Recovery Console approach necessary? I believe that WinXP Home bundled by a lot of hardware vendors doesn't include it. Couldn't you just restore a bare-bones configuration, boot it up and then proceed as you did 3. Can you explain the reason for "set AllowWildCards = TRUE"? Also, more generally, what if anything is the advantage of using the MS shell to rename rather than just using cygwin 'mv'? Does 'ren' do a better job with setting default ACL's. 4. How are you able to rename for example the WINDOWS directory since it presumably has open files? (or is this the reason and rationale behind using the recovery console) 5. At what point in the process did you restore the registry or did you just treat them as regular files that are part of your backuppc backup? 6. Rather than installing cygwin, using the Recovery console etc., would it be faster/simpler/safer to boot from a Linux cd/dvd (after creating the minimalist system install) and then from linux restore the backuppc shares and rename the directories. Then you could boot back up (hopefully) in Windows and run subinacl if you want to make sure the acls's are all correct. Thanks again for sharing your experiences... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki: http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
