[rescue] Backups

[Jeffrey Nonken]

Seems to me it was either you or Jeff that told me about Bacula in the
first place... :)

On Thu, 16 Jun 2005 12:56:33 -0400, Phil Stracchino wrote:
>> Bacula seems like it'll do what I want, including a native
>> Windows  client daemon. I dislike using SMB for backups because
>> it really  doesn't get all the info, especially cross-platform.
>>
>
> Technically, Bacula's native win32 client doesn't get ALL the data
> either.  Microsoft has apparently gone out of their way to make it
> hard for third-party tools to back up the registry, and even using
> ntbackup to dump system state, Bacula cannot get ALL registry data.
>  It's widely reported that it can't get the registry hive for the
> logged-in user, even when using ntbackup as a helper, and some
> people have reported that they can't get any user registries backed
> up at all (again even using ntbackup).
>
What I was thinking of was file and directory attributes. In some ways
those are more important, as the registry is only really useful if
you're doing a bare-metal restore (... generally. I won't claim that
as an absolute). I like to be able to do those, but I don't depend on
them. They can be tricky, especially when you're talking about backing
up a live system with changing data and locked active files,
especially system files. It can be like trying to do brain surgery on
yourself.
>
> (IMHO, the registry -- with its obscurity, fragility, and
> difficulty of backing it up -- is one of the major Achilles' heels
> of Windows.)

That's a polite way of saying that the registry sucks wet farts out of
dead pigeons.

Which it does.