looking for windows (w2k) backup solution

[Joseph Mack NA3T]

On Tue, 17 Jan 2006, Brian Henning wrote:

> dd if=/dev/hdwhatever | gzip -9 | dd of=/path/to/storage/area

hadn't thought about running gzip in here.

I ran nullfile, which puts a file DUMMY.??? in 
\winnt\system32. If you ^C on nullfile (rather than letting 
it terminate normally) you're left with a file in 
\winnt\system32. Deleting a file with a gui in a directory 
with thousands of other files one day will lead to deleting 
the wrong file. This doesn't seem like a good place for a 
temp file. A better place would be one of the directories 
that gets emptied as part of the disk cleanup in the 
explorer.

Rob McCauley told me about temp directories and dd for 
windows, which indeed I have with cygwin (how did anyone 
develope on windows before cygwin?). I wrote a file of 
zeroes in c:\winnt\temp. Unlike linux, the file is left 
there on termination, so you have to delete it by hand.

Using dd on windows seems more like familiar territory than 
running nullfile.

> It's left as an exercise for the reader to find out if block size on the 
> reader dd makes any difference in the performance of the gzipping.

block size doesn't make any difference with reading and 
writing. Presumably everything's buffered, so possibly it 
will be buffered for gzip too.

will go look at backuppc next

Thanks Joe

-- 
Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
jmack (at) wm7d (dot) net - azimuthal equidistant map
generator at http://www.wm7d.net/azproj.shtml 
Homepage http://www.austintek.com/ It's GNU/Linux!