[TriLUG] Your State of Practice for Backups?

[Stephen Joyce]

On Sat, 18 Apr 2009, Alan Porter wrote:

>> How does backuppc handle the windoze registry?  Or does it?
>> 
>
> It backs up files that it has permissions to back up. On Windows systems, the 
> backup is NOT suitable for restoring an entire image. The registry (and I 
> think open Outlook mailboxes) are not copied. When we used it at "the oven 
> place", we took that into account -- if we restored a Windows machine, we 
> knew we would have to reinstall and then copy the "good bits" from BackupPC. 
> For Linux, the backup is suitable for total system restoration.
>
> Alan

There's a user-contributed script which uses Windows VSS to backup open 
files. That may be good enough if you realize that Windows benefits 
from periodic reinstalls anyway.

A VSS backup is still not suitable to attempt a bare-metal recovery, but 
you should get a semi-sane copy of open files (like Outlook pst files, if 
you insist on using Outlook). Check out the BackupPC wiki for more info 
about it (I'm in front of an ancient Sun box with a pitifully old version 
of Mozilla, or I'd send you the exact URL. But it's pretty easy to find via 
google.)

For a true bare-metal restore of Windows, you want to perform an ASR 
backup, which uses VSS to get open files but also backs up the system state 
(including the registry and AD on DCs). When you boot your normal Windows 
install media (XP, 2003, and newer), there's an option to perform an ASR 
restoration.

You can use Ntbackup to dump ASR images to tape or a file on disk, which 
can then be snagged by a backup program of your choosing. Of course it's 
going to be roughly as large as C since the ASR backup is a single file. 
You lose the benefits of deduplication if you use BackupPC or any of the 
similar apps to backup the ASR image. You may still benefit from 
compression though.

Hth.

Cheers, Stephen