Ahhh. No.
As you might have noticed (true, I didn't write it explicitly) - I
mentioned LVM snapshots - it's a windows machine on linux hypervisor.
MK
On 17.12.2023 17:29, Frank Kohler wrote:
Not sure I have all details. If your win deployment is as .vhd why not
checkpoint/snapshot and backup?
On 12/17/23 17:12, Spadajspadaj wrote:
Hi there.
I've been pondering the windows quirks and challenges related to this
particular system. For many years I used the approach of "do a
Windows Backup job and let bareos pick the results". That worked...
reasonably well although windows backup image was always backed up as
full which was not very space-effective. But it worked until one day
my windows (probably after a migration from bare-metal to a virtual
machine; but that was undebuggable - no logs, no nothing) simply
decided that windows backup won't run. Just like that. Also as far as
I remember, windows backup is obsolete and deprecated and the
"recommended" way of handling backup with windows is "back up your
data; preferably on onedrive and for disaster recovery just reinstall
from scratch". There's also this silly thing called "file history".
Anyway, while backing up my documents is easy and I've been backing
it up with bareos for many years now, the most frustrating thing in
case of disaster is the necessity of complete system reinstall along
with all the software reinstall and reconfiguration. Of course with
unices it's relatively easy to handle since you can back up package
lists and easily reinstall the packages from the source and the
configuration and state of the system-wide stuff as well as
user-level configuration is relatively easy to restore (even if it
boils down to "restore whole system to another drive, boot with just
shell running and move over whole /etc, /var and so on - I can do
that easily and get a working system from scratch in two hours).
But with windows while apparently you can back up all files from the
running system (including registry), you can't restore the system
onto a running machine since a lot of files will be locked for
writing and you can't boot up a system with "just shell running" -
windows has so many strange services running underneath that it's
impossible. I already found some mentions of attempts of using WinPE
and bareos-fd to do a bare-metal restore (mind you, my problem is not
a bare-metal restore as such; I don't mind installing a fresh system
and then do a restore over it; it just seems impossible in this case
so it might indeed boil down to bare-metal restore).
For now, since I needed to install windows from scratch anyway (and
restoring about half of the previously installed software took me
several days) I tried to do an ugly hack - Install windows on a small
c:\ disk, then boot with rescue console, move all the essential
directories that are not c:\windows onto another disks and leave
junction points pointing to them instead. This way I'd have a small
system disk which I can do a LVM snapshot of and can back it up on
the hypervisor's side and the "work disk" which I can normally back
up file-wise. The idea was neat but it seems that for windows it's
not a seamless replacement and some programs notice difference.
I'm also trying to do a windows install and point %PROGRAMFILES%,
%PROGRAMDATA% and such to another disk right from the start (which is
an even uglier hack, I admit) but I can't get it to work yet. The
only upside to this story is that I'm learning about windows
installation process (which is nowadays a bit more organized that
used to be, I admit).
Of course I could have a huge windows device and back it up as a
block device but that's extremely ineffective and I cannot reasonably
easily extract files from within such backup, so that's a bad idea.
Any other hints? The point is to be able to restore system _with
configuration_ if something happens. And not use ridiculously big
amounts of space.
MK
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