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!

[rxhui]

The MD5SUM of Personal-Backup-Appliance-1.0.2-vm.zip

is:

723a164102dd98ef99734c18b6794c68

Do an md5sum of the zip file that you downloaded. This will tell you whether the download went awry or the unzipping process went awry.

[JonWilkinson]

I'm trying to clone a 2000 server running on a Compay Proliant server, the client disk doesn't seem to detect the Compaq Ultra Wide SCSI adapter, is there any way to add these drivers to the client disk manually?

[rxhui]

This may or may not help you, but have you tried the alternate slax-based client cd?

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/pba-vm/pba-client-cd-slax-1.0.1b.zip?download

If that doesn't work, to add additional drivers, you would need to remaster the client CD. The default client is based on Insert Linux which is based on Knoppix, so any Knoppix remaster howto guide should apply. Or you could remaster the Slax CD which should be a much simpler process.

Do you know what linux driver the Compaq Ultra Wide SCSI adapter uses?

Do you know of any liveCD that boots up with support for that scsi adapter?

[JonWilkinson]

Thanks for the reply

I have tried both client disks, neither appear to detect the scsi drives.

I have got the drivers for RH Linux 8 from the HP web site its an AIC7xxx driver

[jlcurty]

I have a space problem,

I'm trying to backup a linux server, so I placed the pba vm on a disk where there is plenty of space (250gb) I boot from the pba client on the server,

I select the disk to backup , the other machine I monitor the size of the file in data/backup dir,

I get a first backup file of 2 gb, then a second is created then a third one start but fails due to lack of space ...,which I don't understand since there is space !

I tried to replace the data file by a 40gb file as explained in diskupgrade folder but same result,

thanks in advance for your support

jl

[solomani]

This is a great tool. I “ghosted” one of my PCs already. But on my second PC it gets to about %80 of the clone then stops and spits out that “error code 1” occurred. No idea what this means so difficult to troubleshoot the problem. Any advice?

[mhallett]

I cannot get the iso image to download from the Backup Appliance.

Is there a chance I could get a download link to the client iso image.

When I try to download it I either get a screen or jibberish or the browser offers to save the .htm file. Never the iso image file.

Thanks in advance

Michael

mhallett@maine.rr.com

[rxhui]

Have you tried right clicking on the file and doing a "Save link as..." or something like that?

The CD isos for the client can be downloaded here:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=171414&package_id=202743

[rxhui]

I'm glad you find this appliance useful.

What filesystem is it? If it's windows, sometimes a heavily fragmented filesystem could make ntfsclone barf.

If it's windows, try this:

Run chkdsk and/or scandisk on the partition, then defragment the disk, then try backing up and restoring again.

[rxhui]

Are you still having this problem? I'm not sure what the problem could be.

What's the output of 'sfdisk -d'?

[solomani]

If I have multiple HD or parititions on one HD is it possible to tell PBA to only do one of the partitions or HD? If so how?

Thanks.

[karlgag]

I try to backup 2k3 server SCII drive into an other 2k3 computer also running on SCII drive with PBA server.

I enter the ip Address of PBA server when I boot with PBA client = OK

When I start the Backup I receve Error code 1 : No hard Drive found

I have try with other SCII server and always same result.

Do someone have an explanation how to detect SCII drive?

[kaso]

Hi

have you tryed both boot client cd? there are 2 different version available to download - may be the other one has more drivers on it

[karlgag]

Hi rxhui,

It is possible that IBM ServRaid-6i Controller are not supported with PBA client 1.01?

Thank!

[Alan3285]

Hi All,

First, I have to add my congratulations on this superb effort - absolutely outstanding.

Now, my problem (probably due to me being a total Linux newbie).

I have successfully created an SMB share of the backup data folder and from my WinXP SP2 workstation I can 'see' that folder and the files therein.

However, if I try to copy / paste those files over to a different location on my workstation (I have plenty of space), I get a permission denied error.

Clearly I must have read permissions on that location else I wouldn't be able to see the files, so any ideas what could be wrong?

Thanks,

Alan.

[rxhui]

That feature is not available in the released version, but it's being considered for the next version.

[rxhui]

Have you tried accessing the data SMB share? The backup directory is a subdirectory in data.

[rxhui]

It's entirely possible that both client CDs will not have drivers for your device.

Please try the alternate client CD based on slax if you haven't already. It may work better for you (or not).

[Alan3285]

Hi,

I tried copying the entire data folder, but I got the same error message.

The error (from my WinXP Pro SP2 machine) reads:

"Error copying file or folder

Cannot copy XXX: Access is denied.

Make sure the disk is not full or write protected and that the file is not currently in use."

Where XXX changes depending on what I try to copy (one file or a folder etc.)

I get this even if I try just copying the "dsl-2-4_1148665425.mbr" file which is only 1k big and I have many gigs of spare space on the destination drive so that is not the issue.

I can copy / paste files from other machines to the destination I am using, so there are no permissions issues at the destination side.

To be clear, I can \*see* all the files, including the ones that were there upon download such as "dsl-2-4_1148665425.mbr" and also the ones created when I ran a backup of one of my machines, I just can't seem to copy them to another location.

Thanks for your assistance!

Alan.

[Lone_Pine]

The PBA client CD has worked very well for most machines I have tried. However, on the few that have not worked with the PBA CD, I have sucessfully used SLAX Server Edition v 5.1.8.

However, this weekend I found a machine that SLAX Server did not even work on: an Averatec 5400 notebook. It refused to be networked (VIA/Rhine integrated NIC). The solution: ZENWalk Live, another live Slackware based CD. You can get it here:

http://www.zenwalk.org/modules/tinycontent/index.php?id=1

Thanks for the great utility, rxhui. This is one of the best new Open Source projects I've seen in a while. Keep up the excellent work!