Re: [Xen-users] Backup running Windows machines - redundancy

[Paul Piscuc <paul.piscuc@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Ok, cool. What about reinstalling the system, to rebuild the boot sector 
( or better, restore with dd from an earlier backup - let's assume a 
week old), and then use rdiff to bring the system up to date, from a 
more recent backup ? To be tested.
Again, the purpose of this thread is to find an incremental backup 
solution. DD and other methods work fine, but you cannot do daily 
backups on 8 machines with 100GB storage, and keep those backups for a 
week or more. Also, if one would like to restore a single file from the 
image, things will get ugly.
On 02/11/2011 10:00 AM, Bart Coninckx wrote:
> No way. Rdiff will not take care of things like what you need to boot
> Windows. You need dd or another imaging tool there. If you use Xen
> devices on image files you can obviously easily copy them. If you use
> block devices or LVM, you're back to dd or something else.
>
>
> On 02/11/11 00:01, Paul Piscuc wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I'll be testing the method also, for different Windows versions, with
> > and without memory state backed up. One more question thought ... what
> > are the performance and latency aspects of doing a xm save on a Windows
> > machine? Does is save only the memory state, or other information
> > regarding the state of the machine?
> >
> > And one more thing we can test. What about restoring a rdiff backup(+MBR
> > backup) to a fresh lvm disk ... maybe it will boot in blue screen, but
> > it might work.
> >
> > On 02/11/2011 12:36 AM, James Harper wrote:
> > > > Hi Mike,
> > > >
> > > > agreed. For situations however where data files that are typically
> > > > opened with user applications like Word, Excel and other, I think it
> > > > might be safe to just snapshot the underlying LVM while the Windows DomU
> > > > is running and the users are not accessing the files (typically at
> > > > night), mount this and copy from it. I'm actually testing this now. If
> > > > there's interest I will post my findings.
> > > >
> > > > B.
> > > The Citrix Windows PV drivers include a VSS provider that (I think)
> > > allows you to ensure that your snapshot is consistent at both a
> > > filesystem and application level. I've thought about this for GPLPV
> > > but have never actually done anything about it.
> > >
> > > James
--
Best regards,
Paul PISCUC
System Administrator - Appnor MSP S.A.
US: (+1) 650 336 57 50
RO: (+4) 021 569 46 56
http://www.appnor.com


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