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!

[kaso]

Hi

I restored RedHat disk to new host.

After restoring got the error

"grub files foung in /dev/hda1 ... grub re-install on /dev/hda failed Your drive may not boot. Looking in /dev/hda3 Grub re-installed on /dev/hda Warning drive /dev/hda differs from original /dev/sda Your drive may not boot!"

and guess what - it doesn't boot.

But why? If it recognizes the disk hda and correct partiotions - why can't it re-install grub correctly?

More wierd thing - I'm sure I managed to clone from sda to hda in one of the previous releases - I just don't remember which one

I saw grub problems with diferent disks in Sus, but never in redhat before.

[kaso]

ok, I tryed to edit device.map and grub.conf and menu.list and run grub-install again - nothing help. I just get GRUB> prompt after reboot and the system won't start

[rxhui]

Do you happen to have a separate /boot partition? If so, it could affect the instructions for running grub-install manually.

Try this:

1. mount the partition that contains the grub files (menu.lst, device.map,etc.) (if you have a separate boot partition, mount that)

2. edit device.map and make sure it says what you want

3. umount the partition (this is important, make sure you unmount the partition before the next step)

then run:

/root/pba/fixgrub

[The_Fiddler]

Hi,

some comment.

It would be nice if the screen with te ip-adres in firefox would

display the current version. After updating to 1.02 rc-4 it still say's 1.01.

One an other to indicate a succesfull update.

In the restore/backup menu on client side a "reboot" option would be nice.

Just tested on a client with win-xp-pro-sp2 with 2 partitions. System works after the restore. Windows gives no errors on disk testing (chkdsk).

Partition magic is giving some error's-116 and error's-110 on both

partitions, but as allways when partitioning with linux pq magic is

complaining about the drive.

Thanks for the great work in simplifying this app.

Arie.

Message was edited by:

The Fiddler

[The_Fiddler]

To All,

Is ther anybody wit experiance in installing the vmware player on the host

system "Windows Server 2003 SBS sp1". The documentation mentions the

host as possible, but when installing there is a worning about not to install

the player on a "Domain controller". Problem is of course an 2003 SBS is

allway a domain controller.

TIA Arie.

[nightjaz]

I was able to backup a C: drive and restore to a virtual machine. This tool is great. Now it's got me thinking. I have an old Win NT machine with a number of drive. The hardware is old so I'd like to get rid of it. I would like to virtualize the entire system on my new system which has more horse power and plenty of disk space.

How do I backup the drives, C:, D:, E:, etc. from my old PC and and restore the drives on virtual machine. Once virtualized, I like to see the original C: 😧 E:, etc. still intact. Is this possible?

[kaso]

hi

still no improvment - getting kernel panic when booting. though it says that the original and the new partiotions are alike - sda1 and sda3 original and so are the new one. but still problems with booting.

[nightjaz]

I think I figured it out that it does support multiple drive backup and restore. However, it does not seem to work properly. I'm using VM for all my testing. My source VM has 2 drives. The first drive was backed up OK (nih1). But, the second drive backup (nih2) it did not show any percentage progress. But, when I checked on the PBA I can see in the backup folder and nih2 was growing as it backs-up. Eventually the client came back and gave a 'success' message. Then I did restore. The first drive restored fine. But, the second drive it gives this message and stop,

partitioning drive ...

Idm_validate_privheads(): Cannot find PRIVHEAD 1.

unable to read partition table

Idm_validate_privheads(): Cannot find PRIVHEAD 1.

unable to read partition table

writing partitions files...

Warning: Permanetly added '192.168.0.119' (RSA) to the list of known hosts.

nih2_1155781627_hdb1.zpaa

nih2_1155781627_hdb1.zpab

nih2_1155781627_hdb1.zpac

nih2_1155781627_hdb1.zpad

nih2_1155781627_hdb1.zpae

unzsplit: version: 1.2.0

unzsplit: read/write buffer size: 64 ikbibyte (65536 bytes).

unzsplit: cannot open file/device: /dev/hdb1, in: treat_stdin()

unzsplit: total sum of bytes read: 0; written: 0; elapsed time:

00hr:00min:00sec

unzsplit: average speed of restoring: 0MiB/min

unzsplit: not succeeded..., error in operation!

unzsplit: end of operation

Each of my source VM drives were configured into 2GB split files. I'm not sure if it has anything do with this problem. I did try to configure the 2nd drive on my restore VM as 2GB split files and as a single file. Both gave the same message.

What could I be doing wrong?

[nightjaz]

Another test I did was to restore a 20GB drive to a 30GB drive. It restored fine, but it only restore back 20GB and left the other 10GB as unpartition. It would be good if we can restore it from a smaller drive to a larger drive and the larger drive stays as one bigger partition. This will allow people to upgrade to a bigger drive when the original ran out of disk space.

[gbjbaanb]

rxhui, you're the man. I'll test things out when 1.0.2 is released.

[Mowgli]

Dude, you are the man. This appliance totally rocks. I did some testing, and all things being equal, this thing runs about 3 times faster than ghost in my environment. The only real problem I have had is that if I restore an image to a larger drive, I need to use partition magic to increase the drive size(always tricky with NTFS partitions). If you could set it up so that there is an options to partion the target drive to use the whole drive, that would be perfect.

Thanks again for your work. This is awesome.

[rxhui]

Interesting. I haven't seen that error before, and I'm not sure what's happening. It seems /dev/hdb1 cannot be accessed either because another process is in the way or as if it was mounted.

1. What kind of partition is /dev/hdb1? What OS were you backing up?

2. If it's not too much trouble, can you send me your /etc/fstab file? The contents of your /etc/fstab may be helpful.

3. type mount and tell me the output.

4. type ps -A | grep lvm and tell me the output

5. type ps -A | grep ldm and tell me the output

6. what version of PBA are you using?

You can email me directly at rxhui@users.sourceforge.net or post back to this forum, whichever you want to do.

[rxhui]

A lot of people have been asking for the option of growing out a partition to the end of a disk. I do have plans to add this feature as a post-imaging option in the future. For now, you can use gparted to resize your partitions after a PBA restore.

Try this:

1. after a PBA restore, quit out of PBA.

2. At the console, type startx and press \[enter]

3. once in X, open a terminal, type gparted and press \[enter]

The future implementation in PBA will have the option to do this automatically using the command line tools that gparted uses.

[macroelite]

I've used the PBA a couple of times now and I must say it is excellent! Saves me a ton of time.

Can I have the PBA client restore a backup onto a 3ware RAID array? Has anyone tried this yet?

[rxhui]

One more release candidate before the final 1.0.2 release. Please help me test if you can.

Here's a download link for the patch that you can use to upgrade your PBA VM to 1.0.2-RC5.

Please see my previous posts or the included readme.txt file for instructions on how to do this. This testing update is only a 2MB download.

There are 3 main changes in RC5

\- use dd & lzop instead of zsplit for raw partition backup (faster). restore of zsplit archives is still supported.

\- fixed restore menu bug when there are no archives to display

\- display time elapsed after backup and restore

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/pba-vm/pba-1.0.2-rc5.zip?download

[RWWMike]

I've installed Personal Backup Appliance on a Host system (the server) and have gone to another machine to download the ISO. I do connect to the server but when I select the link to do the ISO download I get an HTML file displayed in a viewer and no ISO download. Help, what's wrong, or what am I doing wrong?

[rxhui]

Not sure why this is happening for you, but you could try right clicking on the link and selecting Save Link As. I believe both Mozilla and IE has a command like that or some equivalent. Good luck.

[rxhui]

Hi All,

Personal Backup Appliance 1.0.2 has been released. This is a complete stand-alone download.

It can be downloaded here:

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/pba-vm/Personal-Backup-Appliance-1.0.2-vm.zip?download

Link to release notes & change list:

http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?release_id=443387&group_id=171414

I also posted two new articles which may be of interest to you.

P2V - Virtualizing an existing OS install using PBA

http://canned-os.blogspot.com/2006/08/p2v-virtualizing-existing-os-install.html

Hard Disk Backup and Restore Walk-through using PBA (updated with new screenshots)

http://canned-os.blogspot.com/2006/08/hard-disk-backup-and-restore-using-pba.html

Enjoy!

[technojoly]

hi

Really good appliance, thanks

I have downloaded pba-1.0.2 Release Candidate #5

I have some error with client (insert), when i have finished to use, i quit With "halt" and i have the message "segmentation fault" i need to power off to quit.

When i use some clients machines, if net card are not known, i type "lsdev" and i have the message "segmentation fault"

How can i install eth0 ?? (server is dl320 hp)

If i boot this PC with ubuntu live cd, the net interface is well known

On this PC, i have vmware installed and backup and restore in virtual machine is correct

great job

Message was edited by:

technojoly

[gbjbaanb]

Well, I've downloaded and tried 1.0.2, and its failed at the first restore. Bummer. i only had good experiences with v1.0.0 too. The problem seems to be that ntfsclone hangs. I'm restoring an ordinary NT4 system with ntfs onto a newly created VM drive. Has anyone had a similar issue?

addendum: turns out my 1st partition was not quite right and needed chkdsk-ing. Though windows works fine on it, ntfsclone didn't create a decent image without it being checked.