> -----Original Message----- > From: Foo [mailto:bfo...@yahoo.co.uk] > Sent: Wednesday, May 12, 2010 3:21 AM > To: Kevin Keane; bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net > Subject: Re: [Bacula-users] Windows 2008/2008r2 Server backup > > On Wed, 12 May 2010 06:51:42 +0200, Kevin Keane > <subscript...@kkeane.com> > wrote: > > > The "system state" in Windows 2008 is really the whole C: drive plus a > > little extra information (I assume, boot sectors or the like). > > Do you know if they have a replacement for ntbackup or a similar tool that > does the same thing? I.e. only back up registries and other files that Bacula > has problems with?
No, they don't. Microsoft basically takes a very sensible position, in my mind: "we only provide a basic tool. If you don't like it, you can get third-party tools". Think of Windows Backup (or NTBackup) as the backup equivalent of Notepad. Basically, what happened was that NTBackup simply got too convoluted and unwieldy over time. It had to be aware of all kinds of special applications such as Exchange and SQL Server. It also doesn't support incremental and differential backups very well (you have to manually figure out which files to restore in which order). I suspect that NTBackup also would have problems with the internal changes to Windows, such as the SxS architecture (the root cause of the proliferation of junction points). Windows Backup really is very, very good - a major improvement over NTBackup. What looks like a weakness at first (it can only back up whole drives, not individual files or directories) is actually its greatest strength. The key is understanding that Windows Backup is conceptually closer to Norton Ghost than to NTBackup. By the way, that change is something many of the other backup vendors are also making. Because Windows Backup goes down to the sector or block level, it can back up basically anything that is on your hard disk - Exchange, SQL Server, virtual machines, registries, active directory, junction points, case-sensitive files, files with multiple data streams, and all those other pesky things that needed special handling in NTBackup. It can also back up only a few changed blocks from right in the middle of a large file. You can still download a read-only version of NTBackup. This is intended to read existing .bkf files from earlier versions of Windows, but it cannot create .bkf files. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
