rsync to 2000/NT servers?

[Donovan Baarda]

On Tue, 2002-12-17 at 21:13, John Morgan Salomon wrote:
> 
> 
> Dr. Poo wrote:
> 
> > Now, can you think of a way to sync the win 2000 OS? (the WHOLE flippin' 
> > system) so that if it were to go down one could restore the full installation 
> > (bootstraps, bootloader, ect!!?) by means of the rsync'ed "backup".
> > please? thank you. ;-)
> 
> Yeah.  Symantec Ghost.

Seriously, Ghost is probably the only tool that can do this well at the
moment. If you have used NTFS, there is bugger all that can read it, and
win2000/NT itself can't even read all of the partition it is running on.

I read a review of Ghost that complained that backups/restores actually
boot you into DOS to run. This is because win2000/NT locks certain OS
files when running. Ghost _has_ to boot into DOS and then use its own
NTFS read/write code to access the partition.

In theory you could build a similar utility from Linux, but the Linux
NTFS read/write code is a bit dodgey. I've even had older versions of
Ghost complain because it couldn't always read the NTFS partition
(something to do with NTFS internally... sometimes it does/doesn't use
some sort of weird compaction or something).

The best non-Ghost alternative is to just rsync the whole damn
partition.

ABO