Hi Roberto,
good to see others are doing
things in a very similiar way.
:-)
My steps differ from
your’s only in step one (three) and in step six.
Since it certainly does
not harm, what are the advantages of your step one?
Afaik, creating a
snapshot should already suffice to get a consistent state of the volume.
Does the pausing of the
VM have some “extra magic” or even extra safety on the snapshot
creation?
Thanks for clearing things
about the acls in the use of rdiff-backup.
I’ll do some
tests with some “really ugly” acls on the files to be backed up.
In my step six I normally
do things like ntfsclone, dd through gzip, partimage and hopefully
soon rdiff-backup.
Surely this thread will
assist others in finding the right solution for their backup strategy.
Guido
Von: Roberto Bifulco
[mailto:roberto.bifulco2@xxxxxxxx]
Gesendet: Donnerstag, 3. Februar 2011
15:53
An: Guido Hecken
Cc: xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Betreff: Re: [Xen-users] Backup
running Windows machines - redundancy
Guido,
currently I'm performing a "raw" file-level backup of LV volumes.
These are the steps:
1. Pause VM
2. Snapshot LV
3. Unpause VM
4. Use kpartx to find partitions on LV-snapshot
5. Mount windows partition using ntfs-3g
6. Use rdiff-backup over the mounted partition, targeting a backup-storage
7. Umount
8. Remove snapshot
> What about
the windows acls on those files, is rdiff able to include them in the backup?
I'm totally dependent on rdiff-backup for such things. So you can refer to
rdiff-backup documentation.
In http://www.nongnu.org/rdiff-backup/features.html
you can find this:
"Filesystem feature autodetection: People use rdiff-backup in many
different environments. The filesystem they want to back up may be on Linux,
Windows, or Mac. It may or may not be case sensitive, support characters like
":", have resource forks, extended attributes, or access control
lists. Moreover, the file system they are backing up to may or may not support
these features.
rdiff-backup tries to handle these situations automatically without the need
for switches like --acl --ea --no-ownership, etc. When run it will run tests on
both the source and destination filesystems to see what features each supports
like case sensitivity, changing uid/gid ownership, resource forks, extended
attributes, or access control lists. To see the results of this testing, run
rdiff-backup with verbosity 4 or higher, as in -v4."
Roberto.
2011/2/2 Guido Hecken <guido.hecken@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Roberto,
could you give us some more informations
concerning your backup-strategy.
I’m working on the same subject and
worked out some kind of “universal backup-script” which
uses different backup-methods, like dd with
gzip, partimage, and ntfsclone for different operating systems.
Since nearly all of our domu have their base on
LVM Storage, the process of creating a snapshot
and afterwards working with different backup
tools on the snapshot seems to be the right way.
For desaster recovery an image created with dd
and gzip works great but as stated by Paul this
kind of backup is not the right tool for daily
(file-) backup.
Do you use ntfs-3g for mounting the snapshot or
the windows file system?
What about the windows acls on those files, is
rdiff able to include them in the backup?
Guido
Hi Paul,
currently I'm
trying to backup Windows machines using rdiff-backup for incremental backups.
I mount the
Windows fs in dom0 and then rdiff-backup performs the incremental backup.
To restore a
backup, just mount the Windows fs, rm all files in the mount point, and use
rdiff-backup to restore an old backup to the mounted Windows fs.
2011/2/2 Paul
PISCUC <paul.piscuc@xxxxxxxxxx>
Hi,
I know that there are a lot of tools to successfully backup windows guest
machine, using samba shares, dd, rsync etc. They all work, but they don't solve
one problem: redundancy.
In my current setup, backups are done using LVM snapshots, and rsync over the
network. The problem is that the rsync is not incremental, and every time a new
copy of the entire lv is sent to the backup server. I could mount on the Dom0
the disk of the windows guest, and send the files, but the restore process
doesn't work.
Do you know/use other method to do incremental backups for Windows machines,
that is more reliable or safer than this one?
Thanks alot.
Paul Piscuc
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Roberto Bifulco, Ph.D. Student
robertobifulco.it
COMICS Lab - www.comics.unina.it
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