On 28 Mar 2008, at 19:13, Francesco Talamona wrote:
On Friday 28 March 2008, Stroller wrote:
I deal with h0sed Windows installations for my customers all the
time. I regularly boot a Knoppix CD and copy the whole C: drive to a
portable disk so that I have a complete backup. I find it
reassuring to use Linux for this purpose because I feel confident
that cp or rsync will copy _every file on the drive_ without just
silently ignoring those marked with the hidden flag, or bitching
about permissions.
I prefer to save the entire partition with PING (Partimage Is Not
Ghost)
or equivalent tools to avoid gotchas with charsets.
rsync and cp are excellent, but you have to mount the partition
with the
right options not to loose coherence in file naming.
Thanks! I'll look into PING. The documentation on PING's homepage
seems a little scanty, but I'm sure a Google will be a bit more
forthcoming.
There are a couple of reasons I appreciate copying on a file-by-file
basis - I don't know if PING would allow me the same flexibility.
Firstly, if I undertake a full format-and-install of XP, I like to
copy back _every file_ from the old system back into a folder called
"C:\Old Stuff" (and place a shortcut to this on the user's desktop).
I find this more reassuring than, say, copying just "My Documents"
because occasionally programs save their data somewhere stupid. For
instance, I recently discovered that the software for a Canon camera
- which offers to automagically import one's photos when the camera
is plugged in - stores the pictures in "Program Files/Canon/PhotoEx/
Library".
When I return the PC to the customer I open "Old Stuff", find the old
"My Documents" and copy the contents into their new "My Documents". I
then right-click on the "Old Stuff" desktop shortcut and choose
"search" - I find their internet Favourites folder, and show them how
one would find (for example) a file called "letter", so that anything
I've missed they can (hopefully) find for themselves.
In the case of the family photos in the Canon folder, I was very glad
to have the whole original contents of the drive available!! I was
able to subsequently copy them to My Photos and tell the software to
use this as its "library", but it might have been inconvenient had I
used a tool that backed up the partition as a single image - I don't
think I'd have been able to recover single files from that once back
onsite at the customer's house and booted into XP?
I tend to take this copy-every-file-on-the-system approach so that if
ever there is a problem with a file missing from backup I can put my
hand on my heart and say, "if it was on your PC before, then you
still have a copy of it". I tend to delete only "temp", "temporary
internet files", "recycled", "recycler" and "system volume
information" directories, plus the old hiberfile (spelling?) &
pagefile. Ideally, when a Windows reinstall is required, I suppose I
would prefer to preserve completely the original hard-drive, and to
do the new reinstall on a brand new hard-disk. However disks are not
yet quite cheap enough that one could normally justify the additional
expense to a domestic customer, and besides, it would rather seem
like a waste to consume a perfectly good hard-drive as a backup that
is unlikely ever to be referenced.
I also find discrete-file copying useful when a computer needs a
repair-install of XP, but the PC OEM has configured it with some
stupid partitioning scheme (probably packaged with a "System Restore"
partition) that is unrecognised by a Microsoft installation CD. In
this case one may be able to back up all the files on the disk,
delete the partition table, create a new single primary NTFS
partition, copy the files back, (edit the boot.ini, if necessary) and
then repair install over the top (which also creates the master boot
record). There are times when an unbootable system may be recovered
to a perfectly usable state, complete with all the users' files &
settings intact (and consequently, with little disruption for the
user). `ntfsclone` might well allow me to do this same thing - as
might PING? - however I haven't yet explored its possibilities - I
wonder about how (well) an ntfscloned secondary-partition might be
restored as a primary, for example.
I have experienced file-copy failures using `rsync` and `cp`, and
this was quite disconcerting until I discovered the cause likely to
be the charset-related problem you mention. I now redirect stderr to
a file when copying & review this afterwards - I don't know whether
I'm fortunate with the charset used in the UK, but so far I might
typically find that only 1 or 3 files from "Temporary Internet Files"
fail (amongst the thousands on a Windows hard-drive), so it has not
(yet) been a problem here.
Stroller.
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