Easy Backup, Recovery & Bare Metal Restore

Why Not Use…?

Many excellent solutions such as Acronis and Norton Ghost already exist. However, most backup tools cost money, only save data files (rather than the whole system), or come with restrictive licenses. Many are applications that are designed to run on a specific platform. While there are some open source alternatives, these programs are often far too complex for regular users, and most require knowledge of a command line, or ask too many difficult questions.

Easy Backup, Recovery & Bare Metal Restore

Redo Backup and Recovery is so simple that anyone can use it. It is the easiest, most complete disaster recovery solution available. It allows bare-meta restore.

More Features, Less Complex

Redo Backup has the most features coupled with the simplest, most user-friendly interface:

• Easy graphical user interface boots from CD in less than a minute
• No installation needed; runs from a CD-ROM or a USB stick
• Saves and restores Windows and Linux machines
• Automatically finds local network shares
• Access your files even if you can’t log in
• Recover deleted pictures, documents, and other files
• Internet access with Firefox to download drivers
• Live CD download size is only about 75MB

How Does it Work?

Most backup and restore programs require your system to be up and running in order to restore. But what if you cannot boot into Windows? What if you have a nasty virus, and you can’t even open Windows to try to restore it back to how it was?

Redo doesn’t need Windows. Download and burn the ISO, place it in your CD-ROM drive, and reboot your machine. The system will load a complete mini operating system with a point-and-click user interface into your computer’s memory, without writing any information to your hard drive. Then you will be able to perform backup, restore and recovery actions—guaranteed—even if you aren’t able to boot into your regular operating system.

Redo Backup and Recovery is a GPLv3 Perl script built with a GTK2+ interface designed in Glade. It is simply a front end to partclone, which performs the actual backup and restore. The live CD is built with xPUD to provide a graphical user interface and unmodified binaries of each program, but the script will run on any Linux platform that has the required programs installed. The Perl source code for the script is contained on the live CD itself. The source code for all other components is available from their respective project homes, subject to their respective licenses.

Take a Mulligan with Redo Backup & Recovery

for more features and to download go here

Aliens Happen

Protect the things you value most.

Thats what VaultPress claims, a new service to protect internet content from anything inevitable catastrophic.

VMware – Invalid Virtual Machine

I received a email from one of my higher authorities to backup one of the ERP servers data, reformat it and keep it ready for re-installation of application.

The server was used for testing purpose, and am well aware of these people’s reaction and baseless pinpoints, oh you didn’t backup this, and that and oh what happened to the file blah blah blah….

How can one (sysadmin’s) defend in such a situation, well here am sharing my experience as well the proactive measures adopted in backing up the system.

It would have been simple, just copy the data (excluding system files) from servers internal drive (all partitions) to external hdd and reformat the server.
But i wanted to adopt a different method of backup, as well the traditional backup.

Hence i backed up the entire physical machine (see the pic at the end for the machine type and model) using VMware Converter (P2V – Physical to Virtual backup) to be imported into VMware Server version 2.0.1 build 156745. The conversion was successful, but when i tried to import the virtual machine i received the following error:

After searching through vmware forum and inspite of adopting the suggestions recommended in fixing the similar error other peers had faced the import failed. Finally i found another suggestion (thanks tech.alexi of petri.co.il) though omgili search.

It was the encoding problem in the .vmx file, i changed it from .encoding = “windows-1252“ to .encoding = “windows-1256“ and lo the machine started without any glitch.

Note: The VMware Server was hosted on Windows 2k3 Server Ent. Edn 32 bit

Physical Host

Vmware Host 

Note: All the critical information revealing the organization data are concealed in the pics due to security measures.

Habits are Good (sometimes..)

People say that habits are good and as well bad.

GOOD if its like you are regular in workout, getting up early in the morning etc..
Bad like back biting, smoking etc..

What are the Good & Bad habits related to computing / IT / Security….etc..?
Well that’s out of scope of this blog to discuss everything the good and bad habits of IT and its related stuff..

Am going to tell you that how GOOD is the practice to take backup and how BAD if you forget it.. and specially how GOOD if its DROPBOX (recently came across, registered and now using it)

Yesterday morning @ my office i downloaded a GOOD WhitePaper (pdf) on Guide to IT Policies and Procedures (i needed them badly to enhance, amend our own) and saved straight away in “My Dropbox” folder (GOOD) and inspite of making a note in my Outlook tasks to print it to take home to have a glance at it, i forgot (BAD) due to hectic schedule (GOD! It happens with sysadmins only).

Back at my home sweet home (where my beautiful wife, two sons naughty & stress buster stays) after dinner before going to bed my usual habit (don’t know whether good or bad) to glance through my corporate mailbox and other things that interest me, a small notification in the system tray grabbed my attention on my incredible personal HP DV6188ea eNotebook.

The notification “Dropbox 0.6.570 All Files up to date”, aahhh… i recalled i had put one pdf file and lo its there is my notebook “My Dropbox” folder though i forgot the hard copy of the file, i managed to glance through the soft copy (something is better than nothing).

My GOOD habit developed recently to save critical, important & always needed files in “My Dropbox” folder helped me forget the concern of forgetting (BAD habit) FILES.

Types of Backups

source: ezinearticles.com

Backups are created to avoid situations of losing precious data. Backups can be created on daily basis, weekly basis, or monthly basis. Backups prove useful at the time of data loss, data inaccessibility, software malfunctions, drive corruptions etc. Before we know the types of backups an individual can perform, the basic backing up process should be clear. Windows offer built-in backup facility which proves easy for the backup creations.

The Windows Backup utility provides various types of backups. One should carefully choose the backup type according to his / her needs. There are different combinations of backups available; Normal, Copy, Incremental, Differential, and Daily.

Normal Backups

A normal backup is the first step to any backup plan. When the Normal backup option is selected; all the selected files and folders are backed up and the archive attribute of all files are cleared. Normal backups are the most time consuming process but prove more efficient at the time of restoration than other backup types.

Copy Backups

A copy backup option is not considered as a planned schedule backup, all the selected files and folders are backed up. Archive attributes of the files are not cleared while this option is selected.

Incremental Backups

Incremental backups are the fastest backup process. An incremental backup backs up the files and folders which were last created or modified or changed since last normal or incremental backup.An incremental backup backs up files that are created or changed since the last normal or incremental backup. After the backup is performed the archive attributes of the files are cleared. Restoration of data from an incremental backup requires the last normal backup and all the following incremental backups. These backups need to be restored in the same manner as they were created.

Note: If any media in the incremental backup set is damaged or data becomes corrupt, the data backed up after corruption cannot be restored.

Differential Backups

Differential backups backs up those files which were created or changed since the last normal backup. Archive attributes of the files does not get cleared after taking the backup with the differential backup method. The restoration process of files from differential backup is more efficient than an incremental backup.

Daily Backups

All the selected files and folders which have been changed during a day are backed up with Daily Backups option. The data is backed up by using the modified date of the files and the archive attributes are also does not get cleared with this option.

Normal backup is easy, fast and effective backup process which can be performed every night. But at times the created backup files can also get corrupt, damaged, deleted or become inaccessible. In this case, MS backup recovery software can help to recover the lost backup files. The bkf repair software offered by various data recovery companies proves effective and result-oriented bkf file repair software. The bkf repair software repairs and recovers the corrupt bkf archives and .bkf files which get corrupt, damaged, and inaccessible due to virus attacks, improper system shutdown, file deletion, accidental deletion
media corruptions etc.