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eftychia at 04:54pm on 2007-11-05For an unknown but probably brief time, I have a computer with a DVD burner in my house (owned by my ex-housemate who wasn't carted it over to his new apartment yet). Despite not having a DVD reader of my own (unless the DVD video player hooked to the telly can be convinced to let a computer access a filesystem on a DVD, which would surprise me), said ex-housemate suggested that since getting a hand-me-down box with a DVD reader in it in the near future wasn't all that unlikely, I should go ahead and back up my computers using his DVD burner while it's still here.
I'm backing up the Linux machines by firing up a Cygwin shell on the ex-housemate's computer, throwing a 'tar' command at the Linux box via ssh, and redirecting the output of the 'ssh' command to a tarfile that'll get burned to DVD.
I don't know how to do the equivalent under Windows.
Maybe it's easier because it's a Windows-to-Windows connection? A built-in Windows tool that I just need to know the name of? Or maybe I can do the exact same trick as for the Linux machines and count on Cygwin's 'tar' to see all the funky sup3r sekrit Windows crap that I'll probably need to get back after a catastrophe? Thing is, being "just a user" when it comes to Windows, and not even a very frequent Windows user these days, I don't really know what 'gotchas' are lurking.
So I beg of the WinAdmins here, a clue or two. How would you do this?
Windows backup
* On the box hosting the DVD burner, create a directory to hold incoming files. Share that directory over the local network (may require you to turn on file sharing) as winback (or whatever name you like). Assign a password or grant access via user, depending on how the box is set up.
* On each Windows box, use your favorite archiver (e.g. infozip) to bundle the files together, and send the result to \\dvdhost\winback\eachhostname.zip . If your archiver doesn't like UNC paths, NET USE J: \\dvdhost\winback will map the path to a drive letter.
* Burn the file(s) to DVD.
You can also reverse the sharing relationship (share a directory on the box to be backed up, sit at the DVD host and copy from said shared directory).
If you want to do file copies (e.g. for regular backups), take a look at Microsoft's robocopy. (Somewhat like rsync, but windows-specific.)
Note that a generic file copy won't preserver ACLs. If you want to do so, I'd suggest using ntbackup instead.
--Rick Owens