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From: "Siegfried Heintze" <siegfried AT heintze DOT com>
To: <cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
Subject: Disaster recover with Cygwin?
Date: Mon, 2 Jan 2006 10:59:50 -0700
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My local linux users group in Colorado is having a very interesting
conversation about disaster recovery on their mailing list.

Let's assume someone types fdisk on my windows boot partition and I need to
recover.

I'm told I can network boot windows across the public internet if I can open
up enough ports on the intervening firewalls. Can I use the cygwin ports of
rsync or rdiff-backup initial create a remote repository and later restore a
bootable windows partition and then boot locally?

Thanks,
Siegfried


> On Tue, Dec 27, 2005 at 10:21:38PM -0700, Siegfried Heintze wrote:
> 
> > So let us suppose I get hacked or type fdisk by accident or a drive
fails.
> > 
> > Do I have a disk to boot from if
> > (1) I buy hosting and send rdiff backups off site?
> > (2) I backup to a USB disk?
> > (3) I backup to a consumer grade network disk?
> > 
> > I believe in each scenario, I have to get out the installation 
> > CDs/DVDs and install the operating system to boot. If it is a hardware 
> > failure, I have to purchase a new hard drive. I'm really slow and it 
> > takes me a terribly long time to rebuild a dual boot windows/linux 
> > system by the time you include all the software development software.
>  
> 
> I just boot from a knoppix cd, setup the network by hand
> (iwconfig/ifconfig/route/resolv.conf, unless you have a router with
> DHCP setup, in which case there's no setup for Knoppix), partition,
> mke2fs, then use rsync or rdiff-backup to restore.  Then setup
> /boot/grub/menu.lst and run grub-install on the boot drive.  (Or you
> could use lilo, but why??)
> 
> 
> Can't comment on the Windows aspect of it much, since I last used
> Windows in 1999.  I do remember that back then, it was very difficult
> to just copy the files over and have a working Windows system.  The
> Windows backup program that came with Windows 98 expected you to
> install Windows, *then* run the restore.
> 
> 
> That program failing me 3 times out of 3 was part of what spurred me
> to learn Linux.  Once I realized what I could do with Linux, I erased
> Windows from all my computers, and haven't put it back since.  I hope
> to never again know more about Windows than the average office worker.
> 
> 
> > I guess one can boot from the network, but I don't know if my network 
> > card has the required capabilities. How do I tell? If I do have that 
> > capability int my network card, would I be booting from another PC's 
> > drive or could this be a consumer grade NAS or SAN (assume there are
such things).
>  
> 
> I've done this for diskless Linux clusters, and it works well but
> there's definitely an investment in learning how to do this.  You
> probably don't want to learn how to do this unless you want to run
> diskless machines.
> 
> 
> > Is there a better way to mitigate this other than my procedure of 
> > weekly connecting a second drive and using "telinit 1 ; cp /dev/sda1
/dev/sda2"?
> 
> I have cloned many Thinkpad 600Es using the simple method I described
> above, and cloning is the same thing as a backup restore, so I know it
> works and is easy too.
>



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