I have an NT box on a LAN working as a file and application server. There is a linux/samba server that does just about all of the network services for a bunch of windows clients, the linux box also has a 12/24Gb scsi2 tape drive in it.
I need to backup both the data and the NT OS (they call it an OS, eh? fancy that:) so that I can completely recover that box from a total fallover disaster. (It runs some important specialised applications that are a total pain to install, setup and configure). Backing up the files is it storing is easy, that can be done over samba shares (and at night when no one else is using any of it). Backing up the os (ie, C: drive) is problematic on a running NT system, expecially with file locks not allowing access to things like the registry and in-use dll and db files. And worse, the result has no hope of being put back onto a hard drive to boot and work successfully as if nothing had happened. What I have done so far is to (manually) reboot into tomsrtbt and dump the (static) contents of raw ntfs partition device files over the network onto the tape drive using either bzip2|netcat or dd. (then netcat into the tape device or a file on the server). The result is in a very inconvenient format, but at least that way I get a "clean" dump that can be put back, and it will work. First question(s): Is there a way to automate this sort of backup? It's easy to schedule an NT box to reboot (eg, using the shutdown utility from the resource kit, some useful things there). At this point it would need to boot into a customised tomsrtbt floppy. (Or perhaps boot from a small hard drive partition at the start of the hard drive with tomsrtbt on it). The customised tomsrtbt would then proceed to automatically backup the raw partition(s) (eg, from hacks to the rc init scripts). When it finishes, it automatically reboots into NT again. Assuming boot from a rtbt-floppy, the boot sector on it would need to be changed ** by something running under NT ** just before the shutdown to boot into the tomstrbt backup. Immediately after the backup has completed, the boot sector on the floppy then needs to be changed to boot into NT on the c: drive. Is any of this possible? (Yes, I'm sure it is). Has anyone got anything like this working? (Surely yes? :) Or is there a better solution? Second question: It is possible to get a complete backup of an NT box using the ntfs.o modules to backup the actual files on the filesystem (ie, using either backup or tar). (I haven't actually tried the tomsrtbt ntfs.o module, I assume that it works ok:) But I want the result to work as "disaster recovery" solution to rebuild the original system into a bootable and runnable state. I don't think that this is possible (eg, restoring the original nt file attributes and permissions). In the end I would much prefer not to backup the raw partitions as this does not give easy access to any of the files within it. Well, not unless it is all dumped back into a partition of exactly the same size. (Hmm, I guess I could dump the tape into a file and loop-mount it with "-t ntfs", I've never tried doing that - but in theory this should work). Besides, if I backup the files and directories off the filesystem itself, it is not possible to write them back directly onto an ntfs partition again (at least not with tomsrtbt, and not reliably even with the latest kernel ntfs drivers). Thanks for any help and suggestions. Cheers Tony
