backing up a Windoz system.

[gaf at blu.org (Jerry Feldman)]

Every night I back up my wife's Windows system by mounting it and then
rsync it to one of my drives. However, I continuously get the "too many
open files" message in the log. This bothered me for a while, so I used
other things, like cp and even wrote my own, and my testing was
performed with virtually nothing running on the Windows system and in
run level 3 on my system.  It appears that the problem is not that there
are too many open files from the standpoint of the backup application,
but it has something to do with the way the SMBFS is mounted and caches.
(BTW: It has nothing to do with energy saving). For the most part, the
files seem to be in tact. 

IMHO, the best way to perform a backup is to have an agent running on
the system being backed up, but I'm not going to buy Legato or some
other commercial system. I was wondering if anyone else had seen this
problem. I'm using a 2.4.21 system. I might run a test with a 2.6 system
depending on some of the feedback. 

Another interesting issue cropped up with my wife's system. It appears
to be running more slowly although I have verified that is is not
infected, but Norton Disk Dr. keeps restarting even after I have deleted
virtually everything from the task manager. Scandisk runs fine through
its normal checks, but when going the surface test, it restarts. I would
run partition Magic on it, but for some reason, it will not boot the
floppy before the HD regardless of what I set in the BIOS, but It does
boot a Linux CD (about half the time). I don't have an aversion to
reinstalling ME, except that reinstalling all my wife's applications is
a real pain. (BTW: the system does not need defragging). 

-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.blu.org/pipermail/discuss/attachments/20040718/524389f2/attachment.sig>