Re: A gentle reminder about backing up Windoze VMs
- From: General Schvantzkoph <schvantzkoph@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 3 Apr 2009 11:39:44 GMT
On Fri, 03 Apr 2009 10:53:14 +0100, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
General Schvantzkoph wrote:
I see no reason to have other than programs themselves on my Vmware
The bottom line of this story is the following, Linux users can forget
just how bad Windows is because they don't use it very much, it's much
easier to break then Linux and much harder to fix. VMs are trivial to
backup, just tar and bzip2 it and squirrel it away somewhere. If you
have a Windows VM you should always make sure that you do a backup
before you install any fresh software or do any kind of update, then
when it blows up on you all you have to do is restore from the backup
copy.
WinPeeCee, as everything else is on anpother partition or machine(data)
All of my data is in Linux directories and it's all under CVS control. My
CVS database is frequently backed up by rsyncing it to several other
machines and by tar bziping it and saving it to DVD, I've never lost any
data even when I've had machine failures.
The point of my story was about backing up the VMs because it's so hard
to fix a Windoze system. Restoring a Linux system is trivial even if you
have to rebuild it from scratch. Doing a fresh install takes 20 minutes,
the fresh install includes all of the free software, so you have no need
to back up the basic system. Commercial software on Linux is licensed
with Flexlm which uses a simple text file. You know where that file is
and you know which directories contain the software. Backup is trivial,
all you have to do is have a backup copy of the license file and of the
software directories. More importantly each application is separate so
that you can incrementally backup your software as you add new commercial
programs. The other thing about Linux is that everything is transparent
which makes it possible to repair a broken system. I use Fedora which
does get broken on occasion, last week a bad version of NetworkManager
was released for example. However when a Linux system gets broken you can
almost always fix it, either by editing a text file somewhere (that was
the solution when tcsh got broken last year) or by reinstalling an older
version of a package (that was the temporary fix for NetworkManager until
the fixed package became available, which happened on the same day that
the bad one was released). Windows systems are different. The biggest
problem is that it's a black box, the configurations are stored in binary
not text and everything is tied together through the registry. Although
it's possible to uninstall many things it's not possible to back out
everything. That's what happened to me. There were security patches
for .Net which were uninstallable. The other big problem is that software
is made deliberately hard to reinstall. H&R Block charges extra if you
want to be able to get a fresh copy of their software after the current
tax season. When you install the state program they don't give you an
archivable installer, they just do the install and then automatically
delete the installer. The bottom line is that the only way to backup a
Windows system is to archive the entire thing instead of doing it
piecemeal as you can with Linux. If you are using VMs you can backup the
system by making a copy of the Vm directories. Unfortunately these
directories are so large that you can't archive them to DVD, but you can
copy them to separate machines. If you are using Windows VMs you have to
treat them as if they could break at anytime so it's very important to
have a current backup before you touch them in anyway.
.
- References:
- A gentle reminder about backing up Windoze VMs
- From: General Schvantzkoph
- Re: A gentle reminder about backing up Windoze VMs
- From: The Natural Philosopher
- A gentle reminder about backing up Windoze VMs
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