backing up a Windoz system.

[david at thekramers.net (David Kramer)]

Jerry Feldman wrote:
> 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. 

If I were in your shoes, I would install a free ssh on it, like putty, and use 
scp to do it.  I also see that there are Windows versions of unison and rsync

http://ambition.cz/blogs/shaitan/archive/2004/04/28/207.aspx
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/download/stable/latest/
http://www.gaztronics.net/rsync.php


> 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

In my experience, Windows "Just Does That" after a few years; not sure why. 
But in addition to viruses, you should also install anti-spyware on it, like 
ad-aware.  Maybe there are spybots running on it.  Norton won't catch them 
because they're not viruses.

> 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). 

Have you tried memtest86?

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