[TriLUG] tar/rsync/ntfs

[Aaron S. Joyner]

Jim Wright wrote:

>Thanks very much for the talk last night, the information about rsync
>and hard-links was very interesting...one question though...
>Of the file backup methods we talked about last night (tar, rsync),
>which will preserve NTFS permissions when done over a SMB mount?  If
>none will, does anyone have a best practice for doing that?
>

Man, isn't that something I'd love to see work.  I've been looking for a 
decent way to preserve NTFS permissions, as well as capture the system 
state, from a Win2k server, via any means necessary.  My only 
requirements being that it's GPL (or at least cheap to free) and that it 
isn't NTBackup.  Things I've tried that don't fit the bill for my 
personal installation:

--- nttar - bundled with Amanda, uses a non-tar output format (dispite 
the name), does capture the permissions correctly, will output to stdout 
(with a little modification), and may suit your needs nicely.  You can 
nttar over an ssh connection with a little help from Cygwin sshd on the 
remote host, something ala this: ssh remote.machine.ip nttar /cygdrive/c 
 > local.file.nttar
--- NTBackup - not reliable when writing to a UNC (\\machine\share) 
style path with Samba as the target, no way to output to *anything* but 
a file.  Won't output to a named pipe, std out, or anything but a local 
file or M$ networking share.
--- Numerous Shareware solutions - Not reliable in their restore of the 
system state / bare metal restores.
--- Veritas BackupExec -- man, this program sure does the job, but to 
the tune of something hovering around $1k per machine
--- MKSSoftware's enhanced tar 
(http://www.mkssoftware.com/docs/man1/tar.1.asp) - This program looks 
like it could do the job nicely, and is tar-compatible.  I've considered 
investing some time (and $$) in trying it out.  The pricing runs from 
around $350 up (it comes packaged with more than just this one 
program).  If anyone has any experience with it I'd love to hear about 
it.  It still wouldn't get the system state, but you could run ntbackup 
locally, and capture just the system state with it, immediately prior to 
running nttar to pull off all of the files.

Note that all of these utilities are run in some fashion on the Windows 
box, but would be compatible with sending the output through various 
means back to a *NIX
server for storage.

If anyone else has other suggestions, I too would love to hear about them.