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Re: backup-restore question



Chris Parker wrote:
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Question being is it possible to restore a backup from a win32 (2003
server) ntfs filesystem via tape onto a linux machine.  I want to be
able to test our backups to make sure all is restorable.  If this is
possible how to do it into an ext3, ext2 or other linux native filesystem?

thanks all for your comments.
Chris Parker
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Short answer, 95%+ probability, no can do.

Longer answer, it depends on the backup/archiver tool used. For example, if you perchance have Cygwin installed on your windows system and used one of the tools that are common to it and UNIX/Linux (tar and cpio come to mind), the answer is an unqualified yes.

More likely you used a Windows tool, which probably has a proprietary archive format, so it can't be read from a Linux box.

Or, you may have used a tool that's proprietary but that has both Windows and Linux versions. This may work.

Then, there's the question of whether the backup is an image of the filesystem itself or just copies of the files. If it's an image (a 'true' image, such as a 'dd' would make), then you might be able to use dd to read the tape into a regular file on the Linux box and then mount that using the loop back device feature:

  dd if=/dev/tape of=/path/to/file bs=10k # or something like this.
  mount -o loop -t ntfs /path/to/file /path/to/mount/point

Bob

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