I've been using Window Home Server for my backups here at home for most of a year now, and I'm really pleased with it. It's far better than the software I was using previously (Acronis). I'm thinking about a backup strategy for my work machine and I'd like to know how WHS compares with Vista's built-in backup and restore features. The plan is to do a full backup to a local external hard drive and backup the documents folder to a network drive on the server. Anyone have experience using the Vista backup feature like this?
Chris,
They're different beasts. WHS backup is pretty much automatic and uses deltas - Vista's is manual and I don't believe offers incremental updates.
While your solution (Vista + network copy) would preserve your data it has two problems I an see;
Your documents will only have the latest revision. If you find something was corrupted a month ago it could be very awkward to recover it. Vista's shadow copies may help though.
As soon as you install a program/patch/config your Vista backup is out of date and needs remade, or these repeated if you reinstall.
These might not be dealbreakers and indeed Vista's backup is pretty decent, it's just nowhere near as good as WHS. In my opinion WHS leaves almost everything else standing, you can be sure this tech will be in the "big brother" server versions shortly.
Also, remember that many backup strategies are busted in some way, and we don't find out until it's time to restore after a hardware failure. This is a bad time to find that out!
When you work out your backup strategy, test that you can actually restore from it. Do this periodically.
WHS is such a quick, simple, robust way to get your stuff backed up. Plug it in to the network; install the client software; done. I'd hate to live without it.
However, as a programmer, I also set up scripts to run each night and back up my pending changes to another machine. For example, when using TFS, I run 'tf workspaces' then 'tf shelve' on each workspace to make a copy. Shelveset names begin with 'z' to make them sort to the end of the list.
Vista Home Premium does not provide in its built-in Backup app the features for saving and restoring the OS image; it only does data and folder backups. For a home user to get the full disk image Vista built-in Backup support without going third-party, you need to have Vista Ultimate.
WHS is nice because it is "centrally" managed and does great things with power management and sleep, if you enable the features (such as waking a machine up in the middle of the night to perform a backup and go back to sleep). I am not familiar with the scheduling features of the Vista app, but the WHS feature set in this space seems pretty complete.
Macrium Reflect (there is a Free Edition which de-features some things) works under Vista and lets you save images over the network and restore them to a drive from a boot disk. I had used this as a solution for my Vista Home Premium host before I got my own WHS up.
Related
First of all, I don't mean version control such as git.
I do use git locally but, I'm trying to determine the best way to do back-ups of source code (as well as other app assets) in case of hardware failure or such.
I was thinking I could set up a script to tar my project folders, and encrypt them with gpg. I would then save the encrypted tar to external hard drives and to 1 or more off-site locations using a service such as amazon drive or dropbox.
Currently, I'm a sole developer so my thinking was that this method should be okay. But I wanted to get some input to make sure I'm doing this the best/most reliable way possible.
If there is a better approach to this that may be more applicable to small teams, then please let me know, as I'm more than happy to do the extra work implementing the approach.
There are much of ways of doing that.
But, if you always work local and you need a simple way of doing that, you may take a look at run scripts if some specific usb device is plugged in.
Meaning that a simple backup script with tar would run if you plug in your specific backup hdd.
Take a look at udev rules in linux.
udev is a generic device manager running as a daemon on a Linux system and listening (via a netlink socket) to uevents the kernel sends out if a new device is initialized or a device is removed from the system. The udev package comes with an extensive set of rules that match against exported values of the event and properties of the discovered device. A matching rule will possibly name and create a device node and run configured programs to set up and configure the device.
Take a look at these posts:
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/65891/how-to-execute-a-shellscript-when-i-plug-in-a-usb-device
&
https://askubuntu.com/questions/401390/running-a-script-on-connecting-usb-device
If you plan to go further, to extend the team or even to keep your code for a while in other words, if you want to be professional, I would go with a scalable and reliable tool designed for this: use a real backup and restore tool and don't use scripts. A lot of people, small (and even not so small) companies are doing it and they end up in trouble: maintenance, scalabolity, update, and so on.
There are plenty of backup & restore tools for different purposes and/or platforms, prices and so on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_backup_software would be a good start :)
Cheers
Werlan
For a project I am working on I want to collect data of malware in a virtualbox for 30 seconds and then revert the VirtualBox back to its original state and repeat this process 500 times for 500 different malware links that I have in a txt file. Before I revert to the normal VirtualBox state, I want to collect data from a program that is monitoring that malware. What is the best way to do this?
Edit: I'd also like to point out that I have code to read the opcodes that are being used by the application. All I would like to do is automate this process for the virtualbox.
I am not aware of such a feature in virtualbox or vmware but you can always use third party tools to compare the state of the different parts (like registry) before and after the execution of malwares.
I heard Ashampoo unistaller is a great tool to do the job but personally never tested it before.
Another option is to use sanboxes like sandboxie or cuckoo sandbox to capture the changes.
Another option is to use online sandboxes like hybrid-analysis which is perfect for what you want to do.
Just keep in mind that most malwares use anti-VM techniques to prevent execution in VMs so you probably will not be able to capture all the features of the malwares.
Hope it helps.
sorry about the long title!
I have a windows server 2003. I want to a cheap backup software that will save every single thing in the machine: files, regsitry, user accounts & settings, down to the single byte! I prefer to have dvd storages at the end to restore from. I don't want to even have to worry about Admin setup or rerun software installations or anything like that.
So, if the server crashes totally, I will be able to bring it back to exact mirror of how it was before it crashed.
I want to be able to insert dvd and reboot to get everything back.
Does the Backup utility on server 2003 do that? If not, does a software like this exist?? If not, what is the next closest thing?
thanks!
On Request, I repost my comment as an answer:
Look at Clonezilla - this is the physical equivalent of a Snapshot in virtual world.
I have read several articles about creating a Sharepoint Developer VM. They all say to "sysprep" them. Why (exactly) must the sysprep be done? What kind of problems (and why) will we run into if we don't sysprep them?
(I suppose what I am asking is, what would be the difference in doing "sysprep" and just bringing up the VM, changing its Name/IP, reboot then install SP?)
I've had success in the past with just copying Hyper-V vhd's as a method of cloning VM's - however, I now use sysprep when cloning any of my machines as it's been mentioned as a best practice in many places. And, it does some nice things like allowing you to cleaning up a bunch of stuff that I don't want to duplicate and letting me choose a new name for the machine on boot. From MS Sysprep Technical Reference:
Sysprep prepares a computer for disk
imaging or delivery to a customer by
configuring the computer to create a
new computer security identifier (SID)
when the computer is restarted. In
addition, Sysprep cleans up user- and
computer-specific settings and data
that must not be copied to a
destination computer.
And you may want to read Russinovich's post on The Machine SID Duplication Myth (and Why Sysprep Matters) for more good explanation of how SIDs work and the very last paragraph has another reason for going this route:
Note that Sysprep resets other
machine-specific state that, if
duplicated, can cause problems for
certain applications like Windows
Server Update Services (WSUS), so
Microsoft’s support policy will still
require cloned systems to be made
unique with Sysprep.
Good luck!
I'm working on some documents on a laptop which is sometimes offline (it runs winXP).
I'd like to backup automatically the documents to a folder to a remote location so that it runs in the background.
I want to edit the documents and forget about backuping and once online - have it all backuped to a remote location, or even better - to an svn server or something that supports versioning.
I want something which is:
1. free
2. does not overload the network too much but only send the diff.
3. works 100%
thanks in advance
DropBox does everything your asking. http://www.getdropbox.com/
Plus it's fully cross platform, Windows, Mac, Linux.
Free up to 2GB.
I like IDrive Online personally. It's Windows/Mac (no Linux), 2 GB free, and here's the important bit: it stores the last 30 revisions of files. And the history for a file isn't counted against your space either; only the most recent version counts. None of the other free online backup solutions I've seen handle versioning as well. It supports continuous backup too. Oh, and they handle being offline beautifully -- even losing connection in the middle of the backup process doesn't bother it.
Dropbox also keeps previous revisions, including of deleted files.