TC wrote:
> 
> This is only vaild in theory. Sorry. The fastest DSL I can get has an 
> upstream of 384 kbit/s (48 kB/s).
> 
> Try to backup 40 GB this way - it will take about 10 days.

Well yes, obviously incremental backups are more than reasonable choice
on this level, I still wouldn't call it simply impossible.

> I would suggest an external HDD for backup. 

So would I, actually. And yes, that also can be carried along with the
laptop itself (remembering that Andy stated backing laptop up as
impossible, 'cause it's moving around the globe continously), I didn't
even think about that at first.

-Aero

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>> There is an option in the encryption software screen to boot from floppy
>> rather than the HD, so maybe I'll end up buying a floppy drive and
>> trying that way.  Any ideas how to make a floppy that just runs my Vista
>> installation? (or gives me command line to copy files between NTFS
>> drives?).

Thanks for all the suggestions, actually I found an old PC with a floppy 
drive, so installed that in my desktop machine and hooked up the encrypted 
drive.  I told the encryption software to boot from floppy and then tried a 
variety of boot disks.

Finally I found "The All In One Boot Floppy" to be most helpful, it allowed 
me to boot my Vista partition without restarting, but unfortunately Vista 
still saw the drive as encrypted (I guess it somehow bypasses whatever 
decryption software was installed).  Anyway, as the user only needed a 
handful of files I could use the NTFS4DOS command line tools to copy over 
the needed files to a memory stick - very slowly.  However it didn't work 
for some files (I don't know why) so I found another program called NTFS 
Reader that copied them over even slower (about 1 hour for a 100 MB file!!). 
It worked though.

> After solving this, make sure to remind your customer of backups :).

Hehe, this was a colleague, and actually him having made a backup 2 weeks 
ago is pretty unusual.  Maybe it's just my company, or the Japanese in 
general, but all secondees that come here seem to have the mentality of 
storing everything only on their PC for "security" - it's a bit screwed, is 
it bad for me to secretly hope one of them loses everything one day?

The issue is that most people have their Outlook pst files as their most 
valuable posession, and to backup the pst files you need to quit Outlook - 
not many people here like having Outlook turned off for 30 mins while 
several Gbs of files are copied to the server each day.

Geez, this isn't even meant to be my job, it's just the IT people are far 
away and don't really do much.

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scott wrote:
> The issue is that most people have their Outlook pst files as their most 
> valuable posession, and to backup the pst files you need to quit Outlook 

Not true. Just make a shadow copy, and back up the shadow copy. It's pretty 
easy.

> - not many people here like having Outlook turned off for 30 mins while 
> several Gbs of files are copied to the server each day.

What, they don't go to sleep?

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Human nature dictates that toothpaste tubes spend
   much longer being almost empty than almost full.

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>> The issue is that most people have their Outlook pst files as their 
>> most valuable posession, and to backup the pst files you need to quit 
>> Outlook 
> 
> Not true. Just make a shadow copy, and back up the shadow copy. It's 
> pretty easy.

OOC, how do you actually do this?

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>>> The issue is that most people have their Outlook pst files as their 
>>> most valuable posession, and to backup the pst files you need to quit 
>>> Outlook 
>>
>> Not true. Just make a shadow copy, and back up the shadow copy. It's 
>> pretty easy.
> 
> OOC, how do you actually do this?

The only trick is that vshadow will make a shadow copy, and then delete it 
when your script exits. So this sets up some environment variables and calls

vshadow -nw -p -script=XYZ.bat -exec=PDQ.bat c:

That creates a shadow copy of C:, writes  bunch of environment variables 
into XYZ.bat that describes where it put the shadow copy, then runs PDQ.bat.

In this case, the script that invokes vshadow is the PDQ script, so after it 
invokes vshadow, it sources the temporary script to set the environment 
variables[1] and deletes it and goes to the end of the script. At the 
beginning, it tests if we're in the callback (looking at CALLBACK_SCRIPT) 
and goes to IS_CALLBACK if so. (This obviously would have been more clear as 
two scripts, but I never really expected to write a tutorial about it.)

If it's running as the callback, it sources the generated script full of 
environment variables, calls vshadow again to connect SHADOW_ID_1 to B:. It 
then runs robocopy to back up \users\darren to m:\darren with robocopy.

When robocopy finishes, it falls off the end of the script, which returns to 
the first callback, which sources the environment variables into *that* 
script and jumps to EOF, which then invokes vshadow to delete the shadow 
copy (which also unhooks B: from anything).

Kind of convoluted, but as you might guess, I'm not the original author. 
Looking at it again, I realize what one really wants is to just stick :EOF 
after the first invocation and be done, and let the return delete the shadow 
copy.

[1] MS clearly hasn't caught on to the whole "environment variables get 
passed in memory" concept yet.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Human nature dictates that toothpaste tubes spend
   much longer being almost empty than almost full.

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Attachments:
Download 'backup darren.bat.txt' (3 KB)

> Not true. Just make a shadow copy, and back up the shadow copy. It's 
> pretty easy.

OK will check your later post in more detail on how to do this - could be 
very useful.

>> - not many people here like having Outlook turned off for 30 mins while 
>> several Gbs of files are copied to the server each day.
>
> What, they don't go to sleep?

Nearly everyone here takes their laptop home with them each night, and I 
don't know how many of them would leave their laptop on every night "just" 
to do backups.  Besides, home internet is usually very limited upstream, 
it's going to take a while.

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scott wrote:
>> Not true. Just make a shadow copy, and back up the shadow copy. It's 
>> pretty easy.
> 
> OK will check your later post in more detail on how to do this - could 
> be very useful.

Yah.

>> What, they don't go to sleep?
> 
> Nearly everyone here takes their laptop home with them each night, and I 
> don't know how many of them would leave their laptop on every night 
> "just" to do backups.  

So have a script they start before they turn it off at night that does the 
backup then shuts down the machine.

Or tell them that if they break the computer, they lose all the work they 
did since last time they left it at work. Their choice. :-)

> Besides, home internet is usually very limited 
> upstream, it's going to take a while.

You only have to move changed files. How much are they going to change when 
they take it home after work and before sleep?

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Human nature dictates that toothpaste tubes spend
   much longer being almost empty than almost full.

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> So have a script they start before they turn it off at night that does the 
> backup then shuts down the machine.

That's a good idea.

> You only have to move changed files. How much are they going to change 
> when they take it home after work and before sleep?

I imagine they are only going to change a few emails, but some people have 
sevreal multi-GB pst files for Outlook which I guess would need to be sent 
to the server even if they are 99% the same?

Anyway, it seems as if the volume copy solution will work.  I was playing 
about today and seems as if even a few PST files making up 10 GB will copy 
within a few minutes to our server here - while Outlook was running with 
them open.

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>>> Not true. Just make a shadow copy, and back up the shadow copy. It's 
>>> pretty easy.
>>
>> OOC, how do you actually do this?
> 
> The only trick is that vshadow will make a shadow copy, and then delete 
> it when your script exits. [...]

So vshadow is the tool for working with Shadow Copy?

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb530725%28VS.85%29.aspx

OK, I've never heard of this tool before. Time to start reading...

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scott wrote:
>> So have a script they start before they turn it off at night that does 
>> the backup then shuts down the machine.
> 
> That's a good idea.

BTDT. :-)

>> You only have to move changed files. How much are they going to change 
>> when they take it home after work and before sleep?
> 
> I imagine they are only going to change a few emails, but some people 
> have sevreal multi-GB pst files for Outlook which I guess would need to 
> be sent to the server even if they are 99% the same?

Uhhh. Probably, yeah. I'm not sure if you're using Exchange why you'd be 
storing the definitive version of .pst files on the laptop. Why not store 
them on the exchange server?

The unix rsync utility has the capability of doing a checksum of the 
destination file and of the beginning of the source file and only copying 
the end if those two checksums are the same.  If Outlook mostly appends, you 
might want to consider something like this.

> Anyway, it seems as if the volume copy solution will work. 

I'm glad. It's a bit of a bugger to track down vshadow.exe, but it sounds 
like you got it going. The /Z option to robocopy is handy too.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Human nature dictates that toothpaste tubes spend
   much longer being almost empty than almost full.

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