One of our systems has a DLT drive we use for backup. It isn’t in a library, and we just use regular tar to back up our main share. Here are some pointers on restoring from tape with tar. First off, you need to specify the exact path from the perspective of the tar archive. […]

In this article we showed how to use rsync to mirror a website. Well, rsync can also be used to provide a lukewarm recovery system. On this workstation, the root filesystem is on /dev/hda3, and we will mirror it to /dev/sda3, which we have mounted on /mnt. If you don’t have rsync, grab rsync from […]

The combination of find and wc is perfect for doing a quick verification of the integrity of the transfer. It doesn’t verify the content of the files; however, it is quick. Run this command in the root of the source and destination directories: find . | wc 9052 9052 256270 The first column of the […]

NT gets a BSOD when you sneeze at the drivers/config. We have to do some upgrades on some NT boxes, but, first, we need to make sure we can recover from a system that can’t boot. This site started out with NT (cough… ntadmintools.com), but it has been a long time. Many Linux and Windows […]

By default, rsync will start the sync of a particular file over again if the connection is lost. Use the –inplace option if the sync is getting hung up on a large file: rsync -e ‘ssh -p sshport’ -av –inplace /source/ root@example.com:/dest/ Since the problem file is compressed, it does no good to use -avz, […]

In this article, we created a boot disk that could recover from a rename of ntldr. Well, what if you needed access to other files on the NTFS file system to recover. It would be nice if you could use something like the Windows 2000 Recovery Console to fix the filesystem. Well, guess what? You […]

We wrote about FreeNAS in this series of articles. A lot has happened with FreeNAS since then. The most important addition is user security for CIFS. We brought up an old PII 333 box to test performance, and it passed with flying colors doing a rather large backup over the network. Here is a screenshot […]

In this article we used the Windows 2000 recovery console to fix the filesystem on an NT server. Let’s use the recovery console to make a BSOD. We’ll just disable a required boot service: Let’s reboot: Nice!! That is what we wanted. Now, we could boot again and fix with the recovery console: That works […]

Try this: find . -type f -size +90M -exec ls -l -h {} \;

Rdisk is used to recover your system from boot problems, registry problems, or OS corruption. Run rdisk by start->run->rdisk. You can specify /s if you wish to restore your security permissions. Rdisk is a little misleading. You might assume that simply pushing the Create Repair Disk button would work, but it doesn’t. Make sure you […]

To use the Emergency Repair Disk we created in this article, you need to boot with the three NT setup disks that can be created by running winnt32: If you don’t have an NT box, you can use the NT distribution cd from MS-DOS or a Windows 95/98 command prompt and run winnt /ox. Boot […]

This is a story about a whale. No!! This is a story about making my computer happy. A few days ago, I started having weird problems on my main workstation, srv-1. My system would lock up completely. Only by pushing the reset button could I wake her from her slumber. I reseated all of the […]

The archive bit is used to determine what files have been backed up up previously on a Windows filesystem. The bit is set if a file is modified. A backup program can then clear the bit when it does a full backup. This allows the backup program to do an incremental or differential backup that […]

If you have the ability to stick a second drive in your workstation or server, it can make a great recovery tool. True, there are a lot of CD recovery distributions out there, but the approach we use here will actually fit on a 100 Meg Zip disk. Further, it is portable to virtually any […]

There are 5 parts to this article: Part1 – Part2 – Part3 – Part4 – Part5 This series of articles will show how to set up software RAID on a Windows Server 2003 system. Before you do anything with your disks, make sure you have a good backup. Please read our terms of use. We […]

If you have a single Linux file server that you want to back up, and maybe a client or two, you can use the full featured Arkeia for free. This is particularly useful for home use, or if you are migrating to Linux in your shop and wish to just back up one server. Arkeia […]

There are 5 parts to this article: Part1 – Part2 – Part3 – Part4 – Part5 We are warned that filesystems on the disks to be converted need to be dismounted: The system will need to reboot: Confirm reboot: At this point, add a drive. After the system reboot, go back in to computer management/disk […]

It is quite easy to clone identical hard drives using the dd command on GNU/Linux. Make sure that you put the source drive and destination drive in the system so that they don’t affect the boot. If you have a SCSI system, this is most likely done by making the SCSI IDs higher. With IDE, […]

There are 5 parts to this article: Part1 – Part2 – Part3 – Part4 – Part5 At the Initialize and Convert Disk Wizard dialog, check the disk you want to convert, and click next: Click finish to complete the Initialize and Convert Disk Wizard: There is now one healthy dynamic disk, and one unallocated disk, […]

I’m not making any guarantees about this or even recommending it, but this is a procedure you can use to fsck a Linux root filesystem in a situation where a reboot is impossible but you suspect filesystem corruption. Example: Remote web server suspected of having filesystem corruption. Can be taken out of service for maintenance […]