Warp wrote:
>   I don't know how well this could be used to back up an NTFS partition,
> though.

One advantage Linux would have here is that Windows wouldn't be running and 
accessing the disk and such. Also, Windows goes out of its way to keep you 
from doing things like reading and writing the security files, for obvious 
reasons. You can get around it under Windows, but it's not as trivial as 
copying things in Linux is - you kind of have to say "make a snapshot so I 
can copy it for backup purposes".

On the other hand, if you make a backup without understanding it, you have 
to restore it to the same place. As a trivial example, restoring the 
free-space bitmap file is going to cause troubles if you don't. Obviously 
you'd have to know what files you're copying and skip the ones that should 
be skipped. (Unlike traditional Unix file systems, all the NTFS data on a 
disk is actually in files, including the MFT (aka i-nodes), the free space 
bitmaps, etc.)  I seem to have 80 unmovable files on my system drive (which 
seems very high to me) and 20 on my media drive (that's just data). It looks 
like about half of those are related to shadow copies, and a lot of the 
system tables don't get to move, but otherwise it still seems like a high 
number. </ramble>

I'm pretty sure the Linux tools for NTFS don't make precise file-level 
copies, to the point where you could restore things to a blank disk and 
expect to be able to boot it and have it run. They don't do encryption, they 
don't handle alternate data streams (as far as I know), they don't handle 
the system-level streams (like security, escrow keys, reparse points (aka 
sym links), etc), and so on.  Not bad for backing up your data, but I 
wouldn't want to try to restore *just* the data and (for example) none of 
the security descriptors.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   There's no CD like OCD, there's no CD I knoooow!

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