[ILUG] backing up a windows nas with linux

[conor at discuskeeping.com]

Quoting Gavin McCullagh <gmccullagh at gmail.com>:

> Hi,
>
> On Tue, 04 Apr 2006, conor at discuskeeping.com wrote:
>
>> Sounds like you could use Ghost 4 Linux and then dump to tape.
>
> I guess I may not have understood this suggestion fully.
>
> 1. How does Ghost 4 Linux take an image off a windows box?

Boot off the CD (assuming your NAS has one)

> 2. Do you mean G4L would give me a disk image to write to tape?  I doubt
>   this would be ideal for restoring files from the tapes (in the way of
>   say tar).  I guess we'd have to restore the whole image, mount it loop
>   and then look at the files.

Yep for disk images.
However, using linux for registry backups / files would not really be a good
idea. You would be better off with a high level application such as
networker/netbackup/commvault/wotever which runs on the linux server which I
assume contains the tape drive/library.

You simply install the windows backup agents on the NAS box and when things go
wrong, all you have to do is nuke the NAS with your provided restore CD's.

Then restore your data/registry/etc from tape (after you re-install the backup
agent of course)

I think you have many options here, and there are plenty of OSS ones too, I
simply have no experience with them.

Otherwise, you can use baremetal recovery with various apps, g4l can be 
used for
this. Depending on the array type will depend on how this is performed.
With hardware RAID your should be fine, windows software raid is 
another kettle
of fish.

>
> It may be that the disk image is the only way to preserve this in which
> case, I guess this is not a runner :-(

Yep, I would go the backup agent route if I were you.
This way you have a centralised backup for many OSes.

> Thanks,
> Gavin

Regards
Conor.