Personal Backup Appliance

[VMTN_Admin]

http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/321

Backup, Restore, or Clone the Hard Disk Drive of any Computer or Virtual Machine over the Network!

[rossco95132]

This is a handy tool. It make cloning drives from one machine to another a snap.

Thanks

Ross

[Serge_Couture]

I haven't been able to boot the client part... either on a vm machine or on a HP dc7600... the iso file downloaded just isn't booting!

The only message I have is "ISOLINUX 3.11 2005-09-02 Copyright (C) 1994-2005 H. Peter Anvin"...

Any clue?

[rxhui]

Have you tried downloading the pba-client-vm.zip from the Personal Backup Appliance? It's a "canned" VM that will boot from pba-client.iso.

After you download pba-client.zip, unzip it, and then download the pba-client.iso file and put it in the same directory with the extracted files from pba-client.zip. Once that's done, open pba-client-vm.vmx with vmplayer.

The only other thing that I could think of is an offending USB or some other peripheral device on your system that prevents it from booting past the isolinux prompt.

Hope this helps.

[rxhui]

Here's what I'm considering for future revisions. Tell me what you'd like to see.

1. Option to toggle PXE support for booting the client over the network.

2. Server driven backups instead of client driven backups. In the current revision, the backup scripts execute on the client end, but it would be useful to be able to have a web interface on the Personal Backup Appliance VM that monitors what clients are connected and then you can manage backups and restores from the server-end through a user-friendly interface.

3. Use device image or dd to copy and restore partitions that are unsupported by partition image.

4. More user friendly options to mount external storage for data.

5. Add webmin, swat or equivalent to manage samba shares easily.

6. Add option to burn system recovery CD or DVD from a backup. (like what you get from your friendly computer OEM)

[cbr]

thanks ! It works whell !!

therefore what's the root password ???

I try to mount a smb share ... but i haven't the root password and 'vmware' doesn't works.

For that did I remove data.vmdk ? or another manipulation ?

Thanks for your answers.

[rxhui]

Glad to hear that it's working well for you. Please take the time to rate my appliance when you get the chance.

In Ubuntu linux, the root account is disabled by default, but the vmware user can use sudo to run commands as root. When prompted for a password, enter in the password for the vmware user which is 'vmware'

Are you trying to mount a smb share so that backups are stored external to the VM? If so, all you need to do is mount the external volume to /home/vmware/data. You don't need to remove data.vmdk

[rxhui]

I posted a Personal Backup Appliance User Guide with walk-through for the hard disk backup and restore feature. It includes screenshots!

http://rxhui.blogspot.com/2006/06/personal-backup-appliance-user-guide.html

[Hammad]

Hi everybody,

I'm wondring If any one can help me in my little project and how can I use PBA to help me on that..

I have 20 PC's and I want to copy one hard disk (with OS ofcourse) to the other PC's, ofcourse this will save my time instead of using Norton Ghost.

How can I use PBA in my situation?

Best Regards

[rxhui]

Here's how you can use PBA to clone 20 PCs.

1. From an arbitrary PC on your network, open up the PBA using VMplayer and let it bootup completely.

2. From another system, download the bootable client CD iso image from the PBA, and burn it to CD.

3. Boot from the client CD on a system that has your master OS installation. Select Backup, provide a name, and wait for the operation to complete. The master hard disk is now archived.

4. Boot from the client CD on another system that you want to clone. Select Restore, choose the archive described by the name that you provided in Step 3. Wait for the operation to complete. The hard disk is now identical to the master. Reboot, eject CD, and boot to new OS.

5. Repeat on the other PC computers.

Here's a re-post of the link to a walk-through with screenshots that may help you out.

http://rxhui.blogspot.com/2006/06/personal-backup-appliance-user-guide.html

[cbr]

thanks for your help,

I try to mount a smb share for the storage of my backups but it doesn't works. I have this message if i do a dmesg |tail : smbfs : data_mount version 1919251317 is not supported.

besides it's a very nice VM !!

nb : i can't vote !! my note is **** (4/5) Very good VM

Message was edited by:

cbr

[rxhui]

I think I may have found the solution for mounting external SMB/Windows shares. The smbfs package was not installed. After installing smbfs, I was able to mount my windows share.

Here's how you can mount an external SMB/Windows share from within the VM (note that this is an optional feature):

1. run this command first to install smbfs:

sudo apt-get install smbfs

2. unmount /home/vmware/data, then mount the smb share to /home/vmware/data (fill in the information for your server):

sudo umount /home/vmware/data

sudo mount -o username=user,password=password -t smbfs //server_ip/share /home/vmware/data

3. then run this command to seed the initial data

sudo /home/vmware/bin/data.sh

Please give this a try. It worked for me. Thanks a lot for trying my VM and see if you can figure out how to vote.

It looks like I will have to either install smbfs in the next version, or beef up the instructions for mounting external shares to include what I posted above.

Message was edited by:

rxhui

[davidric]

I have tried to download this a couple of times. And i keep getting bad CRC with the pba.vmdk and data.vmdk. This results in Error 2 wile trying to load GRUB. Is it possible to download this file direct from a server. As the download seems to be corrupted.

[rxhui]

Direct Download is now available:

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/pba-vm/Personal-Backup-Appliance-vm-1.0.0.zip?download

[hotseter]

I have a basic question to ask while I am downloading this...

I have a real machine that I'd like to virtualize. So I download this VM, and run it from a different machine on the network. Then I boot up the real machine that I want to virtualize, connect to the server and do the backup.

Then after that I have an image of the original machine? Is it in a vmware like disk? Where is it stored?

Thanks,

C

[rxhui]

The backup image of the original machine is stored in a collection of 3 types of files. A binary representation of the MBR is stored in a small file, a text file describing the partition table is stored, and for each partition a partition image archive is created. These files are enough to restore the entire contents of the hard disk onto another machine or onto a VM.

The data is stored on the PBA VM in /home/vmware/data/backup.

You can mount /home/vmware/data to an external share if you want to store the data somewhere else.

[kaso]

Hi

I created iso cdrom from pba-client.iso and I can boot and work from it just fine on one OC, but on the other PC of the same hw-type exactly I get the error after booting

"something went wrong and we can't continue. This should never happen. Please reboot .."

but the reboot doesn't help.

Any ideas?

[rxhui]

Thanks for trying PBA.

I've never seen that error before. It's not an error message that is generated by one of the pba scripts. It's likely an error message from slackware frodo, the livecd distro that I used to build pba-client.iso. When during the boot process do you see the error message? If you like, you can send me a screenshot of the error. My email address is in the bundled documentation. Off the top of my head, I don't know what the problem could be. If it's convenient and if you really feel like it, one thing you could try is to swap the CDROM drives of the machines to rule out the possibility of a marginally bad burn of the CDR which can be read by one CDROM, but not the other.

[Frantic]

Hello,

I just want to know if you have try to use PXE for booting the client over the network and if it works fine ?

I found this appliance very interresting and I tried PXE but I'm not an expert. So it doesn't work and I want to know if it can works of course.

Thanks

[rxhui]

Thanks for trying PBA. PXE support is not included in this version of the Personal Backup Appliance. If you don't have a PXE server on your network that allows booting linux over the network, you will need to download and burn the pba-client.iso file to CD and then boot from that on the client.