Drive Snapshot
Anabella Salina
I've got a sector by sector partition image taken with Drive Snapshot of a physical machine I want to convert with Converter Standalone (to do P2V conversion, automatically fix windows drivers, etc)
I've tried to create a empty VHD in win7,mounted, restore with drive snapshot to that temp drive, then unmounted and try to input that VHD to converter standalone buy it wasn't accepted.
I guess i need a vmc file, as with just a VHD file it seems it's impossible.
Thanks, but I guess that's will not work.
It's not enough to convert image to an identical vmware disk vmdk, beacuse I need to open it with converter to do its magic ( fix windows drivers, scsi drivers, reconfigure services, etc) prior to booting it with Vmware.
And I guess can't feed a vmdk virtual disk to standalone converter to convert o reconfigure windows/drivers/services/etc. Right ?
Several ways to do that. You can build a drivesnapshot restore floppy and add suitable drivers to support the VMware disk controller. Boot a new VM with the floppy and restore. You can use the customized vmdk mounter provided by drivesnapshot to restore the image to a blank VMDK.
Ok. I'll try that. I can of course generate a vmx file for the vmdk.
But somehow I supposed that if I try to convert a vmx virtual computer (still identical to the physical one, not yet "fixed" regarding windows and scsi drivers etc, possibly giving BSOD and not yet bootable by vmware) converter with not do its "fixing magic" as it will asume it's a "good" virtual machine and not a physical image.
Am I wrong with this ?
It's not enough to convert image to an identical vmware disk vmdk, beacuse I need to open it with converter to do its magic ( fix windows drivers, scsi drivers, reconfigure services, etc) prior to booting it with Vmware.
And I guess can't feed a vmdk virtual disk to standalone converter to convert o reconfigure windows/drivers/services/etc. Right ?
I'm trying if possible to use converter and not manual restore on a clean virtual machine ( as it's a lot more work )
And I've more success with converter that with manual conversions (problems with drivers, BSOD , etc )
You can monitor your USB Snapshot progress on the Snapshots page. When your USB Snapshot is complete, an information icon is displayed with a shipping number and an encryption key to view the contents of the USB drive. USB Snapshot drives that are returned within 30 days from when you receive the USB snapshot drive are eligible for refunds.
The tool you want (which most closely resembles Time Machine) is called rsnapshot. Unlike normal backup tools it copies only things that have changed, and it allows you easily to travel to many points in time. You can tell it how much disk space it is allowed to have, and it adjusts the number of snapshots kept to stay within that limit. A very nice tool.
I use a two-fold strategy: #1 is LVM snapshots and number two is rsnapshot, which I use to make point-in-time backups to a dedicated external hard disk drive. The external hard disk drive is placed so that I can easily yank it on my way out the door should something bad happen. I don't (yet) use an off-site mechanism other than periodically burning a snapshot to a series of encrypted DVD discs and shipping them to a friend's place in another city for storage.
I highly recommend rsnapshot because of the way it does the snapshots, using hard links for things that haven't changed. If your home directory goes bonkers, you can just take an rsnapshot copy and tarpipe or rsync it back to your new home partition after reinstalling or recovering from drive failure.
Several. There's the old fashioned dd(1), which is kind of arcane; there's dump(8) and restore(8); there are several open-source products around, like Amanda; and if you want, you can install ZFS and use a cron script to take periodic snapshots, giving you something effectively identical to Time Machine (see Tim Foster's weblog.)
Some volume managers also allow creation of writable snapshots, extending the copy-on-write approach by disassociating any blocks modified within the snapshot from their "parent" blocks in the original volume. Such a scheme could be also described as performing additional copy-on-write operations triggered by the writes to snapshots.
Some file systems, such as WAFL,[a] fossil for Plan 9 from Bell Labs, and ODS-5, internally track old versions of files and make snapshots available through a special namespace. Others, like UFS2, provide an operating system API for accessing file histories. In NTFS, access to snapshots is provided by the Volume Shadow-copying Service (VSS) in Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 and Shadow Copy in Windows Vista. Melio FS provides snapshots via the same VSS interface for shared storage.[2] Snapshots have also been available in the NSS (Novell Storage Services) file system on NetWare since version 4.11, and more recently on Linux platforms in the Open Enterprise Server product.
EMC's Isilon OneFS clustered storage platform implements a single scalable file system that supports read-only snapshots at the file or directory level. Any file or directory within the file system can be snapshotted and the system will implement a copy-on-write or point-in-time snapshot dynamically based on which method is determined to be optimal for the system.
On Linux, the Btrfs and OCFS2 file systems support creating snapshots (cloning) of individual files. Additionally, Btrfs also supports the creation of snapshots of subvolumes. On AIX, JFS2 also support snapshots.
You can create snapshots from disks even while they are attached to runninginstances. Snapshots areglobal resources,so you can use them to restore data toa new disk or instance within the same project. You can alsoshare snapshots across projects.
If you want to customize the default storage location for all your newsnapshots, update the snapshot settings for your project(Preview). Google Cloud maintains apredefined default storage location value until you update the snapshotsettings for the first time. This predefined location is the nearestmulti-region to the source disk.
Read Creating a Persistent Disk snapshot scheduleto learn about creating a snapshot schedule and attaching it to your disks.Backing up your disks regularly with scheduled snapshots can reduce the riskof unexpected data loss.
To perform this task, you must have the following permissions:
- compute.snapshots.create on the project
- compute.disks.createSnapshot on the disk
- In the Google Cloud console, go to the VM instances page.
In the Location section, choose your snapshot storage location. The predefined or customized default location defined in your snapshot settings is automatically selected. Optionally, you can override the snapshot settings and store your snapshots in a custom storage location by doing the following:
Create your snapshot using the storage location policy defined by yoursnapshot settings (Preview)or using an alternative storage location of your choice. For moreinformation, see Choose your snapshot storage location.
On your Mac, you can view a list of APFS snapshots, copy information about the snapshots, and delete them. An APFS snapshot is a read-only copy of its parent APFS volume, taken at a particular moment in time. An APFS volume can have zero or more associated APFS snapshots.
Information Technology automatically takes incremental backups, called snapshots, for many network file locations on Microwave periodically throughout the day. We also take and keep the last five days and then a single week's worth of snapshots so that you can access a backup if needed up to a week old. The backups work as follows:
Hourly.13 is converted into nightly.0 and the process starts again at the hourly.0. On day 2 the nightly.0 is copied to nightly.1 and the new hourly.13 is converted to nightly.0. This progresses through nightly.4 when it becomes weekly.0. When weekly.0 ages out, the previous snapshots are removed and the cycle continues.
You can access the snapshots through Apple's Finder by mounting a new location to the network. The process is the same for each volume or location you'd like to browse to however we've provided the steps for the department drive and personal Microwave locations.
I have a MSSQL Express server running on a VM. Hosting provider I use has an option to create drive snapshots. The server is running all the time and is not stopped during the drive backup. Backup has no special functionality related to MSSQL. If I keep my data files on such drive and use snapshots in case of disaster recovery, are there any risks that database may not be restored?
Typically server backup programs will coordinate with SQL Server through the Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) to ensure that SQL Server places the database files in a consistent state before volume snapshots are taken. At a minimum backup programs should create backups that are consistent on a per-volume basis.
While you should certainly take note of the points that David Browne makes I have used the drive snapshot approach for backups and have successfully restored small SQL databases from them. But see the caveats at the end of my answer - I would be very wary of attempting this on a large database.
Most backup software of this type will allow you to mount the backup as a virtual drive. Once mounted you can just copy back the MDF file. You can either simply stop the SQL server service, replace the original file(s) then restart it, or attach the MDF file as a new database and copy back selected data from it.
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