Re: [discuss] Best practices for home user backup of Windows 10/11 to OmniOS / Illumos ?

[Toomas Soome via illumos-discuss]

> On 10. Jan 2025, at 09:22, Stephan Althaus <stephan.alth...@duedinghausen.eu> 
> wrote:
> 
> On 1/10/25 08:00, Hugh McIntyre wrote:
>> Hi,
>> This is maybe off-topic, but I’m wondering what other people do here for 
>> backup of Windows systems in an Illumos-centered backup world.
>> I have a mixture of OmniOS (backup server) as well as Linux, MacOS, and 
>> Windows 10+ systems needing backup.  For everything except Windows, backup 
>> works well with rsync (along with "—backup-dir=DIR" for incremental deltas). 
>>  But Windows does not work so easily, not least because of filesystem 
>> differences and lack of native rsync.
>> I can use rsync on Windows as well by running within WSL, but 
>> ownership/permissions are messed up and only files visible to the user 
>> running WSL can be backed up.  Meanwhile the default Windows backup service 
>> to a SMB-exported filesystem from ZFS seems to be unreliable, and also may 
>> not work well for files outside a user’s home directory.  What setup are 
>> other people using?  I have a strong preference to something that generates 
>> a visible hierarchy of files on the backup server, not a proprietary binary 
>> backup column since this makes it non-recoverable if the backup software is 
>> no longer available.  And I’d prefer to use the existing OmniOS box, but 
>> could consider other custom options if recommended.
>> If there are good recommended solutions, let me know.  Not using Windows is 
>> not an option, because of Photoshop Lightroom.
>> Thanks,
>> Hugh.
> 
> Hi Hugh!
> 
> It sounds that this is a Desktop-like usage of your Windows system, with 
> maybe at least a regular shutdown.
> 
> For my purpose I use a windows vm with the virtual disk on a zfs dataset with 
> snapshots, a FreeBSD-bhyve-host with GPU passthrough to the win-vm.
> 
> This way i could clone a vm-disk-snapshot and mount, read and compare the 
> contents in case..
> 
> 
> Did you try a remote rsync from an unixoide system to \\windowssystem\C$ ?
> 

For macos, I use timemachine on smb volume, so I can use native tools for 
recovery. I think, windows has nowadays the backup tool of their own, and it 
was also possible to use smb share for it. Since I managed to kill windows from 
my home, I can not tell about its practical value any more;)

rgds,
toomas


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