It's not a bootable image backup, but for media it works well to run
cygwin on the windows P.C. and use its rsync over ssh to synchronize my
20Gig+ photo directories with a ZFS filesystem on the Solaris box. I
wouldn't necessarily recommend doing this over an 11Mbps wifi
connection, but it does eventually work ;-) I also have a script to
backup my Apple via OSX's rsync facility. Fortunately Sun finally
includes rsync by default in recent Nevada distributions. This is yet
another step in closing the usability gap. As far as I can tell,
opensolaris distributions such as Nevada and Nexenta now include
everything necessary for a NAS solution except for the hardware.
Richard L. Hamilton wrote:
What I think you are asking for is a client backup
system that sends to backup to a network share.
There are many of these, both free and not free. I
know a common one is Acronis True Image. You run on
your Windows machine, it saves regular backups to
your network share, and you can have it backup files
or partitions/disks. Then to restore a whole disk
you boot from a CDROM which reads the backup over
the network.
It is worth noting that you're asking for a client
backup system that comes with the server. There is
technically no integration that needs to happen
between the client and the server, other than SMB
support. But when providing a server solution,
people automatically look to you for the backup
solution. Which is good if you want to include that
value for them. See Windows Home Server, which
includes the functionality mentioned above, in the
form of a backup client that they package with it.
I would think there's also a performance problem with backing up
via network shares, at least compared to something that
reads locally and streams the data to a backup server (where there would
also have to be a way to read the data back from the backup server and
stream it to a local restore program, as well as an index of the
streamed data stored somewhere, to make finding specific files
with particular attributes (modification time, size, etc) feasible.
I suppose there must be a Windows equivalent of {tar, pax, cpio, ...},
that is, a format that alternates headers describing pathnames and
associated attributes with the accompanying file contents. But I'm not
into Windows, so I don't know what that would be or what tools make
it easy to use.
Personally, I think the ideal streaming format needs one other thing: a
validity trailer for each file's data, that indicates at least either:
* valid as described in the header
or one or more of
* file size changed to x bytes (could be higher or lower),
data was read without I/O errors
* file modification time changed upon 2nd check, data may be
inconsistent
* I/O error encountered at offset y, data up to that point is valid, after
that is implementation dependent whether it's fill (preserve start of file
data + header file size=trailer offset relationship) or best effort. I haven't
seen
one that does that, but would certainly like to. That would reflect the
nature of streaming data more accurately.
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