Re: [PLUG] Backing up Windows to Linux

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/mount

This is Microsoft's documentation on mounting and NFS share. You can set up a secure NFS share on a Linux box, it has traditionally been viewed as insecure but you can password protect on the Linux server. Once you have the NFS share mounted it will appear as a drive volume on the Windows machine and you can use the command line utility of your choice to move the data from WIndows to Linux. In the past I had an old NAS that had a SPARC processor that could share NFS and I used it for this purpose but you can easily set up NFS on any Linux device you would like to use as a backup server.

Michael Lazin

.. τὸ γὰρ αὐτὸ νοεῖν ἐστίν τε καὶ εἶναι.

On Fri, May 26, 2023 at 6:35 AM Rich Freeman via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:

On Fri, May 26, 2023 at 6:27 AM N. Albert via plug
<plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:
>
> On 5/26/2023 5:55 AM, Rich Freeman via plug wrote:
> > I have a few Windows PCs I care about, and so I want to back up data.
> > They're generally not powered on 24x7, as they're typically things
> > like tablets, desktops, etc. While I do strive to keep the
> > obviously-important stuff stored on network shares on linux hosts,
> > Windows software tends to stick stuff in local places
>
> This may or may not work well for you, but if you use roaming profiles,
> then all your application data can live in a central location. If you
> have a domain, I think this is easier. Some companies/orgs do this.

I've done this in the past, but found that it tended to have issues.
Plus it requires running a windows domain. My profiles are huge at
this point and I also care about stuff in the local profile (a lot of
software also isn't very good about distinguishing between the local
and roaming profile). This is a direction I'm not really interested
in trying again. On paper though you're right that it was the
solution Microsoft intended for this sort of thing.

> I use Windows on all my workstations, and I store everything important
> on central file servers and only back those up. If I were to lose a
> workstation, it would be no significant loss for me - inconvenient,
> perhaps, but no data is lost.

I do the same, however I have zero confidence that I've caught
everything I would care about. If I had to do a reinstall of Windows
I'd try to avoid relying on the backups, but I think it is inevitable
that I'd end up dipping into them for something that was missed when I
configured everything important to be stored on a network share. I
think it is just better safe than sorry, when all it costs is a few
hundred GB of disk space.

--
Rich
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