The thought had crossed my mind, and lines need to be drawn somewhere. This
is basically for OS partitions and client machines. Partial backups and
restores are done from the file server's tape drive. The "directory of
really good stuff" as far as a client is concerned should be in the user's
home directory which gets backed up every couple days in the rotation. The
idea behind the drive imaging is to do a complete restore from a periodic
image if, say, a virus/worm/[insert nickname for malicious code here] hits
(take off and nuke it from orbit... only way to be sure) or do a complete
restore from an original image if the machine's performace has been dropping
(this seems to happen to Windows machines over time) and you just want it
back to the "factory" settings.
Well, the Linux boxes can automate it well enough. It's the Windows boxes
(herein referred to as "clients") that would need an extra step. That was
where the idea for the boot floppy with the automation comes in. It
wouldn't be a problem to make it policy for the users to "boot to this
floppy, wait for the message saying it's done, remove floppy and reboot as
normal" when they want to create a periodic backup. The alternative is to
use something like PowerQuest's Drive Image 7 which can automate it well
enough, but from the looks of things would require a seperate license for
each machine. This is a personal network, so a penny saved...
In checking that website, it mentions that "dd" includes unused blocks in
the image. Is this entirely true? My only experience with "dd" was in
making images of a CD ROM, in which case the resulting file was the expected
size. However, CD ROMs are very different from hard drives in terms of
their structure. If, say, I have a fresh install of an OS on a drive,
taking up 1 gig and leaving 19 empty, will "dd" create a 20 gig image of
said drive? If this is the case, then I will definitely want to take
another route than "dd" (possibly using the aforementioned commercial
software for the Windows machines and, equally possibly, using Partimage for
the Linux machines).
Partimage is definitely something I'll include in my subsequent testing, so
thanks for the link. If it can backup/restore NTFS (currently experimental,
but it will be some time before I actually work on this project so it may be
fully supported by then) and can automate off the floppy boot idea I
described earlier, than it still may save me the licensing cost of
PowerQuest's software.
Regards,
David P. Donahue
