Whatever you pick, test the restore to make sure you're getting the system back to the state you expect it in. Without clearly understanding the restore liabilities, the backup strategy is incomplete.

Starting with Windows 8, the system supports a fairly stateless system, so the system itself doesn't need a full backup. Short of a dead drive, the built-in recovery volume can boot and fix pretty much any problem, including wiping system and boot volumes and restoring them to factory state. For a dead drive, then you need recovery media on something like a USB flash drive or external hard drive.

Be sure to find out if the backup utility you pick actually backs up everything on the drive. Most of them will only backup and restore the boot and system volumes, not litany of partitions now on contemporary UEFI Windows 8.x computers: EFI system partition, OEM diagnostics partition, recovery partition, boot partition, system partition, and an IRST swap partition.

My suggestion is to create USB recovery media using either the OEM tool for this purpose, or a decrapified install media from Microsoft:

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/02/save-yourself-from-your-oems-bad-deci... http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/create-reset-refresh-media

The Microsoft one arrives as an image. The OEM one usually doesn't create an image, it creates a USB stick, so you'll have to image it yourself and then keep a backup of the image. If you write zeros to the USB stick first, that image will be more compressible, if you intend to back it up with dd. I've also tested using dosfsck -v (fsck.vfat) to get details of the FAT file system the OEM tool creates and writes its files to. So I have a readme.txt that tells me how to format any USB stick properly, and then a tar of the recovery files which I untar onto the stick - and of course I've tested this recreated recovery stick all the way to a completed reinstallation of the OS. It saves some space and time in the end, but dd is fine too.

From this point my Windows backups are terribly unsophisticated

because I don't have any really important data on it. But I think it's a model to start from because it's so brain dead easy. It depends entirely on an Outlook account. By default, Windows 8 wants you to create you user login with an Outlook account. You can lie and say you don't have one, lie again and say you want to create one, and then at the bottom there's a way to opt out and create a local only account that isn't Outlook based. But if you do create an Outlook based account (or use AD I presume), all the relevant settings are backed up to the Microsoft cloud automatically. And when I do a completely clean install and sign back into this same Outlook account, all of it gets restored: settings, documents, pictures, everything.

Problem A: lockin, proprietary, it's Microsoft dependent. So you could use SAMBA 4 and AD all of this to avoid the Outlook part.

Problem B: It's a single point of failure. But if you could figure out a way to backup what Outlook is backing up to the cloud, and also figure out how to restore that - you'd work around this and not have to do these crazy monolithic backups and restores.

I did a pile of these when doing Windows 8 + Fedora dual boot testing back in January and it's very much like doing an Android/Cyanogen reset and restore from (cloud) backup if not easier and faster. I got the entire reformat, reinstall, restore down to less than 30 minutes.

One could probably argue that only backing up the user directly in a conventional manner is sane, and just expect to never have to restore it unless the cloud backup-restore doesn't work.

Am 14.07.2015 um 19:00 schrieb m.roth@5-cent.us:

Leon Fauster wrote:

...

<snip> This will continue to be the case, and we have planned a number of projects that are sponsored by Bacula Systems. The will probably begin to appear in the community version between March and July of 2015.

Sorry, your syntax has me slightly confused. Are you saying that it is the case that, in general, the Windows binaries will be pay-only?

sorry for the missing context: i just quoted from the URI below. Kern Sibbald stated that the win binaries will be provided for free.

...

A few of these new features will be:

1. Free Enterprise Windows binaries with all the latest features for

individual community members.

</snip>

http://sourceforge.net/p/bacula/mailman/bacula-announce/?viewmonth=201501

Which doesn't help me at all, since a) I'm not in the bacula community, and b) this is for an agency of the US federal gov't which shall remain nameless*, but whose budget is 20% *lower* than it was in 2003.

in the first post you (your manager) mentioned bacula as possible solution, therefore i came up with this information. So, the bacula packages are in the repositories :-).

-- LF

On Tue, July 14, 2015 12:49 pm, Gordon Messmer wrote:

On 07/14/2015 07:17 AM, m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:

...

My manager just tasked me at looking at this, for one team we're supporting. Now, he'd been thinking of bacula, but I see their Windows binaries are now not-free, so I'm looking around. IIRC, Les thinks highly of backuppc; comments on that, or other packaged solutions?

I would strongly recommend a product that supports VSS. Bacula does, and Veeam does as far as I can tell (mentioned by Tom). BackupPC does not. Without snapshots (VSS), you may back up inconsistent data, and you'll miss backups of open files.

I use bacula to backup windows boxes. I do create full box image backup (using Windows image backup tool) every other year or so. As far as user data are concerned I rely on bacula (had to restore something they accidentally deleted or modified a couple of times - successfully). We don't have many Windows boxes though, - about a dozen. We are mostly Linux, FreeBSD and Macintosh shop.

Valeri

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

On 07/14/2015 11:01 AM, Tony Schreiner wrote:

backuppc does support pre- and post- backup scripts, so it is possible to implement backing up from vss. I've never done it, but there examples can be found

http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/faq/limitations.html "So far, the best that BackupPC can do is send warning emails to the user saying that their outlook files haven't been backed up in X days. (X is configurable.) The message invites the user to exit Outlook and gives a URL to manually start a backup."

So, no, it doesn't look like that's possible. There *is* a link on that page to an MSDN post which describes a script which can use VSS to copy individual files to a new location. However, there's no integration with backuppc, and there's no identification of open files, so you need to know in advance which files might need to be copied with VSS.

Don't do that to yourself. Just use a backup program that supports VSS.

On Wed, Jul 15, 2015, 8:22 PM Valeri Galtsev galtsev@kicp.uchicago.edu wrote:

On Wed, July 15, 2015 7:05 pm, Michael Mol wrote:

On Tue, Jul 14, 2015, 10:37 AM m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:

My manager just tasked me at looking at this, for one team we're supporting. Now, he'd been thinking of bacula, but I see their Windows binaries are now not-free, so I'm looking around. IIRC, Les thinks highly of backuppc; comments on that, or other packaged solutions?

We use Bareos extensively. By default, Bareos is Bacula-compatible. We use Bareos extensively.

What is the story between bareos and bacula? And why you prefer bareos as opposed to bacula. Just curios: I use bacula (it is bacula 5, server is FreeBSD, clients are CentOS 5,6,7, FreeBSD 9,10, Windows 7). Thanks for your insights!

Story, as I understand it, is that the developer needed an incentive to get people to pay for a license, so closed distribution of the Windows File Daemon (the program that reads files and sends them off for storage, for those unfamiliar) so that only those who pay for a subscription can use it. (This is all perfectly legal.)

Naturally, this pissed off people who couldn't afford the license, but were already committed to their implementation.

So...Bareos is a fork from the last open version of that code.

As for why I use Bareos, I'd spent copious time studying Bacula's manual and figuring out how to apply it. I was 80% of the way through implementation, complete with offsite backup of all my Linux hosts.

And then I went to back up the Windows hosts. I was not happy.

Took me only a day to rebuild it with Bareos.

Am 16.07.2015 um 02:22 schrieb Valeri Galtsev galtsev@kicp.uchicago.edu:

On Wed, July 15, 2015 7:05 pm, Michael Mol wrote:

...

On Tue, Jul 14, 2015, 10:37 AM m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:

My manager just tasked me at looking at this, for one team we're supporting. Now, he'd been thinking of bacula, but I see their Windows binaries are now not-free, so I'm looking around. IIRC, Les thinks highly of backuppc; comments on that, or other packaged solutions?

We use Bareos extensively. By default, Bareos is Bacula-compatible. We use Bareos extensively.

What is the story between bareos and bacula? And why you prefer bareos as opposed to bacula. Just curios: I use bacula (it is bacula 5, server is FreeBSD, clients are CentOS 5,6,7, FreeBSD 9,10, Windows 7). Thanks for your insights!

I personally prefer bacula. For more informations about the case above look at:

http://blog.bacula.org/category/kerns-blog/ http://blog.bacula.org/category/status-reports/ http://sourceforge.net/p/bacula/mailman/message/33199834/

-- LF

--On Thursday, July 16, 2015 12:44:32 PM +0200 Dennis Jacobfeuerborn dennisml@conversis.de wrote:

I've tried bacula/bareos and they are horribly outdated in how they approach backups and only really useful if you use tape backups (because that's the only target they were designed for).

FUD.

I've used bacula for years through various versions. The last time that I backed up to tape was probably five years ago. Since then, I've used disk-based backups, both permanently mounted and detachable.

Having a tape *model* does not imply that you're using tape. Yes, the disks appear as tape libraries, autochangers, etc, however that doesn't impact their usability or performance.

Bacula is a solid multi-OS platform.

Devin