View contents of NTbackup file

[Syl]

How do I view the contents of an NTbackup file?

[Mark Adams]

"Syl" wrote:

> How do I view the contents of an NTbackup file?

By restoring it to the computer that created it.

[Twayne]

"Syl" <S...@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:FDC9C50B-9CA4-49CB...@microsoft.com

> How do I view the contents of an NTbackup file?

With ntbackup.exe. In Restore mode it'll show you everything in the
backup that you could Restore/choose from to Restore. It'll give you an
explorer like window, same as when you backed them up.

Or, depending on what you're looking for, a plain old text editor but
you can't Restore anything that way. Only ntbackup can do the actual
Restore after you've selected what to restore.

HTH,

Twayne`

[Twayne]

"Mark Adams" <Mark...@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:BB57EA5F-37D0-41BD...@microsoft.com

> "Syl" wrote:
>
>> How do I view the contents of an NTbackup file?
>
> By restoring it to the computer that created it.

Although that's one way it's far from the best. Just use ntbackup's
Restore feature to look at the list of files/folders in the backup and
choose at will. No need to restore anything if you don't want to, or
restore a file, a folder, or several of each, or the whole drive. A
complete restore of the boot drive requires the ASR disk for that backup
set.

HTH,

Twayne`

[Syl]

> By restoring it to the computer that created it.

Not interested in a restore --- I am only interested in viewing!!!

[Syl]

> With ntbackup.exe. In Restore mode it'll show you everything in the
> backup that you could Restore/choose from to Restore. It'll give you an
> explorer like window, same as when you backed them up.

Ah ha! That is what I was looking for. Thanks!

You think they might tell in the documentation or even on the MS knowledge
base :)

[Twayne]

"Syl" <S...@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message

news:47889F0F-B8DD-4B2B...@microsoft.com

But, but, but ... the engineers that wrote the Help file already KNOW
that, why say it again? < grin >
Actually they do tell you, but finding it is another story.

Twayne`

[perl]

Is there a way I can get a list of all of the files in a backup? The
interactive list is nice if you know what you're looking for. What I
want is a list of everything that's in the backup, preferably in the
form of a text file, which I don't have to navigate. This is especially
important for an incremental backup. I want to see what files are in
the backup. The directory tree for the incremental backup includes all
of the directories, even though most of them are empty. It would take
me forever to navigate through hundreds of directories to find every
file. I just want a listing of all of the files in the backup.

[Paul]

This is all I could find in a quick search. Apparently it's a tool that
translates .bkf into .tar, and then you could use something like "tar t"
to create the file list.

http://savvyadmin.com/extract-nt-backup-files-in-linux-using-mtftar/

The readme file...

http://gpl.internetconnection.net/mtftar.readme

This doc is supposed to describe the basic format of MTF.
Apparently .bkf is related.

http://laytongraphics.com/mtf/MTF_100a.PDF

This statement, casually mentions the relationship.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backup_Exec

"Backup Exec shares the same Microsoft Tape Format with
Windows' built-in NTBackup."

Just a guess,
Paul

[Paul]

I had a chance to test this. I downloaded mtftar.tar.gz on a
Linux machine.

gzip -c -d mtftar.tar.gz | tar xf -
cd mtftar
make

The resulting file does not need to be installed. It doesn't
need to be run as "root" either, if the backup file is just
sitting on a disk.

The first test I tried, was "pulling" the file from the Windows
machine via SAMBA. That failed miserably.

When I copied the file via SAMBA, to a Linux directory, then
the test passed.

If you were sitting in the same mtftar directory above, with the
binary file "mtftar" sitting in the directory, and in the same
directory, you'd downloaded the Backup.bkf file, the command looks
like this. This is how I created the output listing. The first
part of the command, translates from mtf format to tar format, and
the "tar tf" part does a "listing" of the tar file being streamed.

./mtftar < Backup.bkf | tar tf -

To test this, I used the ntbackup utility in Windows, to create a
small (90MB) test .bkf file. And this was the output from the test
(this is just the first part of the output).

C:
C:/Downloads/oem3sr2_nfi_exe_disk_utility
C:/Downloads/oem3sr2_nfi_exe_disk_utility/oem3sr2.zip
C:/Downloads/oem3sr2_nfi_exe_disk_utility/starthere.htm
C:/Downloads/oem3sr2_nfi_exe_disk_utility/genedump
C:/Downloads/oem3sr2_nfi_exe_disk_utility/genedump/4.0
C:/Downloads/oem3sr2_nfi_exe_disk_utility/genedump/4.0/dbghelp.dll
C:/Downloads/oem3sr2_nfi_exe_disk_utility/genedump/4.0/genedump.exe
C:/Downloads/oem3sr2_nfi_exe_disk_utility/genedump/5.0
C:/Downloads/oem3sr2_nfi_exe_disk_utility/genedump/5.0/dbghelp.dll
C:/Downloads/oem3sr2_nfi_exe_disk_utility/genedump/5.0/genedump.exe

So the translation produces absolute paths, with forward slash characters
for delimiters. When this output was created on the Linux machine,
it had to be opened in Wordpad and re-saved as a .txt file, to correct
the line termination character difference.

So it does appear that the code does a decent job in a modest test.
If you can translate the code in a Windows environment, you may be
able to achieve similar results, with no Linux machines.

When I created the Backup.bkf, I select the "oem3sr2_nfi_exe_disk_utility"
directory as the thing to back up. And the above output, does identify
the exact location of the original files.

HTH,
Paul

[David H. Lipman]

From: <alexl...@gmail.com>

Dredging up old posts, such as 2009, with a suggestion of a web site is spam



--
Dave
Multi-AV Scanning Tool - http://multi-av.thespykiller.co.uk
http://www.pctipp.ch/downloads/dl/35905.asp

[Andy]

I don't think anything beats an image backup.

Andy

[David H. Lipman]

From: "Andy" <andrewke...@gmail.com>

> On Saturday, October 19, 2013 7:27:56 AM UTC-5, David H. Lipman wrote:
>> From: <alexl...@gmail.com>
>>
>>
>>
>> Dredging up old posts, such as 2009, with a suggestion of a web site is spam
>>
>>
>>
>>
>

> I don't think anything beats an image backup.
>
> Andy

It depends. With backup software extracting a file, folder or a groups of files is
relatively easy. When a system is "imaged" it is usually restored as an image and
extracting a file, folder or a groups of files is not always very easy with each
applicxation providing various levels of providing that capability.

Thus it is a combination of imaging and backups that may be best.

[Paul]

David H. Lipman wrote:
> From: "Andy" <andrewke...@gmail.com>
>
>> On Saturday, October 19, 2013 7:27:56 AM UTC-5, David H. Lipman wrote:
>>> From: <alexl...@gmail.com>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Dredging up old posts, such as 2009, with a suggestion of a web site is spam
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>> I don't think anything beats an image backup.
>>
>> Andy
>
> It depends. With backup software extracting a file, folder or a groups of files is
> relatively easy. When a system is "imaged" it is usually restored as an image and
> extracting a file, folder or a groups of files is not always very easy with each
> applicxation providing various levels of providing that capability.
>
> Thus it is a combination of imaging and backups that may be best.

Without descending into a "definition war", some of
the backup tools I've used, there are options for
opening the single big backup file and browsing it.

Macrium Reflect allows mounting the .mrimg file for inspection.

System Image from Windows 7 or Windows 8, is a .vhd file,
and VHDMount or the built-in mounter in Windows 8 allows browsing.

And I found some sort of converter a couple years ago (written
by some non-pro software developer), which would convert NTBackup
into something I could browse later. There's probably a couple options
for that format.

So don't give up. Where there is a will, there is a way.

And even if you possess only a sector level copy of a partition,
there is a tool out there to convert a sector level copy of
a disk, into a .vhd file, and from there is can be mounted
for random access. Isn't the world a wonderful place ? :-)
Too bad it takes so much Googling to find crap like that.
For the last tool, I can't even remember what I did with
that one :-)

The thing is, a fixed-size VHD file, is very close to being
a sector copy of a hard drive. All it takes, is adding a couple of
KB of info at the head and the tail of the file, to convert it
to a certain flavor of VHD (which can then be mounted). It's not
exactly the same as a dynamic VHD (commonly used in VirtualBox
or VPC2007), which grows in size as you add more files. But I was
impressed by how little the conversion process, was modifying the
original file.

Paul

[David H. Lipman]

From: "Paul" <nos...@needed.com>

Like I stated, varying degrees with various software.

A backup works on the file structure.

An image works on the hard disk structure and inherits the partition scheme
and formatting structure.

[CRNG]

On Sat, 19 Oct 2013 19:20:51 -0400, Paul <nos...@needed.com> wrote in
<l3v44j$krv$1...@dont-email.me> Re Re: View contents of NTbackup file:

>David H. Lipman wrote:
>> It depends. With backup software extracting a file, folder or a groups of files is
>> relatively easy. When a system is "imaged" it is usually restored as an image and
>> extracting a file, folder or a groups of files is not always very easy with each
>> applicxation providing various levels of providing that capability.
>>
>> Thus it is a combination of imaging and backups that may be best.
>
>Without descending into a "definition war", some of
>the backup tools I've used, there are options for
>opening the single big backup file and browsing it.
>
>Macrium Reflect allows mounting the .mrimg file for inspection.

DriveImage XML Image Backup (freeware) also allows individual or
multiple file restore. It's very easy.
<http://www.runtime.org/driveimage-xml.htm>
--
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and having to visit 10 different news stands to pickup each one.
Email list-server groups and USENET are like having all of those
newspapers delivered to your door every morning.

[Andy]

You are right.

I left out the other things I do as well.

I have a batch file that runs on each startup and zips and copies new and changed files to an external drive.

And I use Erunt to backup the registry.

Andy