Thanks yet again Dominic! On Mon, 2012-10-01 at 12:59 +0100, Dominic Raferd wrote: > Leland: > > Plaudits for your detailed research. Here is a developer thread from the > time when the Windows ACL code was being developed for rdiff-backup: > http://www.backupcentral.com/phpBB2/two-way-mirrors-of-external-mailing-lists-3/rdiff-backup-23/patch-backing-up-windows-acls-90543/ > > (June 2008).
Thank you. I've looked at this briefly but it seems that, mostly, the patches mentioned as "attached" aren't actually there. Maybe I need to be registered to see/access them? Regardless, I did figure out that win_acl.py was probably the place to start looking. Well, that and the win32security module. Also, I was able to build my own Win32 native executable using hints from a thread I posted a link to previously. Things must have changed since those posts because it required some manual intervention to get it to build. I used the latest releases of the python librsync and win32security modules and it _did_ build eventually. Sadly (or not depending how you look at it), it seems to behave identically to the .exe from the Sanannah/nongnu web site. > > Sadly rdiff-backup is no long under development, the last maintainer > seemed to lose interest after March 2009 and no one has picked up the > baton. I still find it very powerful and reliable for backing up data > from Windows machines to a Linux backup server - I'm not bothered about > permissions, though. Yes, it _is_ reliable _and_ useful! And it is sad that development has ceased. Of course the thought of picking up/forking the project on my own has occurred to me but since I don't even know python, never mind the nuances of doing backups from (potentially) many different types of file-systems, this seems unlikely at the moment. :( :( :( [Off topic ...] The way I structure my backups, permissions info is pretty essential as I try to preserve enough to do a full system restore if necessary (modulo the fact that I don't have to worry about big active databases on any of my systems). On Linux I back up /home frequently (to keep recent backups of all users "personal" data) but / and /boot (or whatever is necessary for a system restore) much less regularly. (BTW, / and /boot are backed up with --preserve-numerical-ids.) Then, if I have to, I can start from "bare metal", boot a Linux live CD with rdiff-backup on it (or install it if needed), mkfs the hard disk partitions, mount and restore /, chroot to the restored /, mount and restore /boot and /home, install grub pointing to the restored /boot, and bingo(!) I'm up and running again. I'd _like_ to be able to do the same for Windows boxes but this seems unlikely (at least not directly with rdiff-backup) because of all the funky stuff like "reparse points" and "alternate streams" that NTFS supports. But I would at least like to be able to back up and (obviously) restore C:\Users (roughly the equivalent of /home on Linux). However, if I back it up without ACLs as you suggest then if I restore all of C:\Users, it seems like the permissions will be all wrong and I'll just get a big mess to sort out. Yes? No? As a final off topic note, I've just "dicovered" "burp" (see http://burp.grke.net/http://burp.grke.net/ ) which claims to back up Windows to Linux, and to do reverse diff style incremental backups as well as some other nifty features but I've not had a chance to adequately test it yet. I _can_ say it's _much_ harder to set up though for whatever that's worth. [... well, back on topic ...] > (Note that the rdiff-backup option --no-acls works > both for Posix and Windows systems.) [...] Ah, no, I didn't know that. Thanks. I'll try that but I _suspect_ that unless I restructure my backups it won't work for me (see above off topic stuff). I suppose another approach that might be adequate for C:\Users would be to look at adding support for the cygwin ACL API to rdiff-backup. I think cygwin layers the the Solaris ACL API on top of the Windows ACL API (see for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cygwin ). Obviously, that would require running it under cygwin but for me that would not be a Big Deal. Well, it sounds like I'm kind of on my own here. If I get anywhere I'll post here (unless this is the wrong place for that?). In the meantime any and all help, hints, comments, suggestions, etc. are more than welcome! Cheers Leland -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Leland C. Best | Creationists make it sound as though a 'theory' is [email protected] | something you dreamt up after being drunk all night. | -- Isaac Asimov ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ rdiff-backup-users mailing list at [email protected] https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/rdiff-backup-users Wiki URL: http://rdiff-backup.solutionsfirst.com.au/index.php/RdiffBackupWiki
