Personal Backup Appliance

[VMTN_Admin]

http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/321

Backup, Restore, or Clone the Hard Disk Drive of any Computer or Virtual Machine over the Network!

[Frantic]

Yes I know, but I want my clients to boot over network without cdrom. Because my computers haven't got cdrom drives and no floppy drives.

I found how to make my clients boot over network but what is missing to me is the way to access your appliance after.

Maybe I must find a good vmlinuz or something else.

Sorry if I'm not clear, I don't know how to explain my problem because like I said before I'm not an expert in Linux.

[rxhui]

When the PBA first boots up, firefox launches with a page describing 3 methods for launching the PBA client. Have you tried method #2? Method #2 is for the scenarios where you're booting your own linux over the network or from your own CD. Once your linux is booted from the network, you can launch the client, by running the following.

as root, do this

\# wget http://192.168.0.100/pba.sh

\# sh pba.sh

(NOTE: replace the IP address with the IP address of your PBA)

One caveat. For this to work, your linux needs to have the supporting files that the script calls (most distros do) (e.g. wget, sfdisk, dd). Let me know how it goes.

[Frantic]

Yes that is what I tried but hum ... I installed PXE server with PBA maybe it is the reason why it doesn't work. Well I don't know how to explain what I want.

My client start over network until it finds the pxelinux.0 but after I don't have a "boot linux" so I don't have a prompt to copy the command lines.

Well maybe is it not clear enough.

(Sorry it is not easy to explain and I'm french so excuse me for my english)

[Serge_Couture]

I gave it another try today and it worked!

It seems that the iso file I tried wasn't the good size compare with the one I downloaded from the VM url...

It's working great! Thanks for the appliance!

Serge

[duhaas]

This is a great tool, made my first image backup, just not sure now how to bring it up into vmware workstation?

[jtowne]

I keep getting an error after it starts to do the backup. It says something wrong with hda2. hda2 is ext3 but I am using LVM. Is that my problem?

[kaso]

Hi

Can I backup and restore NTFS (win) partitions - I mean - can I use this appliance to backup my XP instead of ghost software?

Thanks in advance

[jtowne]

I only found this when I ran the appliance. I haven't seen this list anywhere else.

Partition Image supports the following filesystems:

• NTFS - Windows NT, 2000, and XP

• FAT16/32 - DOS and Windows File Systems

• ext2fs/ext3fs - Standard Linux File System

• Reiser3 - Journalized File System

• HPFS - IBM OS/2 File System

• JFS - Jornalized File System from ibm

• XFS - Journalized File System from sgi

• UFS - Unix File System

• HFS - MacOS File System

[kaso]

I tryed to backup xp (ntfs) . It starts backuping the disk, writes "backing up /dev/hda1" and fails after 1% with an error "problem or unsupported partition"

[rxhui]

The filesystem support list for partition image posted by jtowne is correct.

I backup and restore Windows XP with NTFS filesystem everyday using partimage and it generally works, but the NTFS support in partimage is experimental. According to the partimage page, an ntfs partition with heavy fragmentation or filesystem errors can make backups fail. If you like, you can try running defrag and scandisk in windows before archiving.

The next release will have improved NTFS support. I will be using ntfsclone instead of partimage as its NTFS support is further along.

[rxhui]

Thanks for trying PBA. Yes, you are correct. LVM partitions are not supported in partition image. I am working on the next release which will support LVM by doing a raw backup on LVM partitions.

[jtowne]

Do you have a timeframe on this?

I really hope thisis going to work I cam quite excited by the description and the potential ease of use.

[rxhui]

Yes, I do. Version 1.0.1 will be released to the PBA sourceforge site no later than first week of August and I will also seed a torrent. I'm shooting for sometime this weekend, and if things do not go smoothly perhaps a few days after the weekend. The bulk of the work left to do is testing and documentation. The scripts are pretty much done. A more thorough list of changes will be included in the release notes, but this is a preview of what to expect.

\- ntfsclone will be used for ntfs partition, partimage will be used for everything else that partimage supports, and device image will be used for everything else; this means that in theory, barring scripting errors, any partition/filesystem type can be backed up and restored.

\- new client cd iso based on INSERT linux. I will no longer support the other two methods to connect to the PBA server. INSERT linux is a better base for future implementation of PXE support in PBA.

\- VM will be smaller in size by over 100MB.

Does your LVM volume set span across more than one hard disk? At present, PBA only supports configurations with one hard disk. I'm contemplating adding support for multiple hard disks, but it could delay the schedule.

[hemps69]

AWSOME Virtual Appliance, been looking for something like this for a year now. Is it possibe to install to a server directly (not a VM machine)? Vote 5/5 for it.

[kaso]

hi

PBA was working just fine when I was cloning one phisical machine to another (just needed to change network info each time - can't have 2 hosts with the same name, of course .. by the way - any chance of adding some post script in recovery, asking if I wish to keep network info or change it while restoring? please ).

Ok. The problem is when I tryed to clone from physical disk to my VMWARE virtual host - it performed restore, but failed while booting, saying "waiting for /dev/sda1 to appear .. not found exiting to /bin/sh" and that's it.

Is it impossible to clone from physical to virtual disk in vmware or should I do something with vmware guest machine settings or waht?

thanks a lot

[rxhui]

Thanks for the feedback! Yes, it's possible to install on a real machine, but at the moment, there's no install script or documentation on how to do this. At some point, I will put some documentation together. Right now, my top priority on this project is to get the next version 1.0.1 released.

[rxhui]

I will look into doing post-processing of the hard disk after the restore to change the hostname. In the past, I've injected startup scripts into a Windows hard disk to change the hostname on first bootup. You should be able to do the same for Linux installations.

Cloning from physical to virtual disk in vmware is \*definitely* possible. I've done P2V migrations on drives with Windows and on drives with Linux. In Linux, you need to make sure that if your physical machine is scsi, your VM is also scsi. If your physical machine is IDE, your VM should also be IDE. For Windows OS installs, create a VM with SCSI even if your install is IDE. When you first boot, the system will blue screen. This is expected. There are some threads on this forum that document this. The reason it blue screens is that the SCSI drivers for the VM are not installed. To correct this, you need to inject the SCSI drivers and registry changes into the Windows installation without booting it up. I used UltimateP2V to do this with good success. http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/?page_id=174

Doing a "P2V Migration using PBA" writeup is on my list of things to do.

Regarding the "waiting for /dev/sda1 to appear" error, did you create a VM with a SCSI disk or an IDE disk? I could see how a VM with IDE drive could give you that error.

[kaso]

hi

physical disks (origins) are scsi, linux, suse, sda1("/") ; sda2(swap) partitions.

Virtual guest was created with scsi disk 12gb (devided into 2gb parts).

[kaso]

ок. I created new virtual disk in VMWARE and now I'm getting

"sfdisk error sector 0 doesnot have an msdos signature

no partitions found

writing MBR

dd unrecognized operand `/dev/sdb'

"

right after I choose option "restore disk" after loading from cdrom

why sdb? I have nothing related to sdb in original image only sda

and what's the problem with sector 0??

[rxhui]

Not sure what could be happening. Did you have a USB storage device attached on your physical computer when you did the backup? The current version of PBA can do strange things when you have more than one storage device attached.

Can you send me the contents of the .part file for your backup? The .part file is in /home/vmware/data on the PBA VM.

The sfdisk error is nothing to be alarmed about. Your disk is blank, and the first thing the script does is sfdisk -l to determine your storage drive. The next version that I'm working on will suppress the error message.

Thanks for using PBA. This will help improve the next version.