My FreeNAS server is slowly dying and before that happens i need to migrate all data in the NAS to a windows server.
The FreeNAS has ZFS Snapshots and i need to restore data from a few days ago to the Windows server.
I have done some research and i can't think of the best way to do this. (i am not linux/Zfs savvy)
So the things i need to do is,
Restore ZFS Snaptshot from a few days ago to a windows Server
I mounted a windows share to the Freenas using mount_smbfs //username:password#server.name/share_name share_name/
I can copy and create files on that share just fine. So I was wondering if it was possible to restore an entire data set from an snapshot to the windows share.
Any help, tips is much appreciated.
Note. I could easily copy all data on a freenas volume to the windows share, but what makes it complicated for me, is restoring data from a snapshot without overwriting the current data on the volume and moving that data to the windows share.
You have two sensible possibilities:
Access the ZFS dataset (shared over SMB) from your Windows Server, then right-click on it in Explorer and choose "Previous Versions". You will get (after a short time depending on the number of snapshots) a list of all snapshots with their dates. You can then either explore them and copy some files over, or you can choose to copy all to another location (e. g. your new share).
Mount the Windows share on FreeNAS like you did, then go to <pool>/<filesystem>/.zfs/snapshot/ (path completion on the shell might be turned off for the .zfs directory, so type it in manually). There you'll find all your snapshots (like you would have on Windows' Previous Versions) and you can copy some or all files over to the new directory.
I would suggest the first way, because you have the GUI and cannot do any harm to the FreeNAS system this way.
On the other hand, have you thought about the possibility of rescuing the system? You did not specify why it's dying, but things like hard drives or mainboards can be swapped quite easily without requiring setting up everything anew. Maybe this would help you more than moving the data off to another, unconfigured system?
Related
The capacity of my SSD is just 60Gb, and I have just over 5Gb of free space at the moment. Is there a way to install Xcode directly on the external drive? Or to do so I'd have first to make this drive bootable and boot my system from it?
There are various possible solutions, including, making use of symlinks, dual booting two versions of macOS (one on external SSD), and many more.
But the best way I found was to create a new macOS user and change its home directory to external SSD (by going to advanced user settings under Users & Groups System Preferences).
The exact steps I followed:
Create a new APFS partition on external SSD with 100GB storage. (say NewVol)
Create new macOS user and change its home directory to /Volume/NewVol/user
Logged into the new user with external SSD connected, and installed xcode in ~/Application. (i.e. the local Application folder, not /Application)
Why this works best is because you don't need to manually manage symlinks, also symlinks might create problems during builds. All the required files (including builds and temporary files) are stored in user directory, so no space occupied on internal drive. Also, no hassle of installing a complete separate OS, and going through cycles of reboots to switch the OS.
There are a couple of options you can consider.
Move some files to the external drive, instead of installing applications on it. This would be your best bet, since applications have dependancies. Also, if you run them from your SSD, they will get better performance.
If you absolutely need your files on your SSD, and you can't move them, then I would suggest moving any third party applications to see if you can free up space for Xcode, and run it from your SSD.
If the two options above don't work for you, then you will have to try and work with Xcode. There is no easy way to change the install location. Your option here would be to free up some space temporarily, by moving bigger files to an external drive. Then do the Xcode install in your applications folder. Once that's done, move Xcode to the external drive, and take your files back to your SSD. Here is another questions that talks about the same topic.
I've got this question awhile ago, but it still bothers me.
I work with a few virtual machines running Windows 2008 server, mostly demo VMs and test machines. Since most devs use them, I prefer to not have individual setups here and there and maintain a catalog of exported VMs and hard drive images instead.
Thanks to side-by-side assemblies and windows updates each server carries an overhead of about 6 - 12 Gigs in side-by-side folder (winsxs) and windows update.
Suppose I have 50 exported VMs (with their images), each has about 3 Gigs of payload data (OS, programs, data) and about 12 Gigs of shared overhead, which is mostly the same for all these VMs. Then I waste 2/3 of my storage space (about 600 Gigs total), not to mention network overhead of pushing this redundant data around the network when a dev wants to download a new VM snapshot.
So I am thinking of a way of consolidating the winsxs folder accross multiple VMS. Ideally, I'd like to come up with some shared drive or something. I am even willing to designate a physical device for this.
I realize that Windows server has minimum requirements and these files cannot be deleted (http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/itprovistasetup/thread/9411dbaa-69ac-43a1-8915-749670cec8c3).
I also found a post on moving winsxs folder, but it does not appear as a reliable solution.
Does this sound even remotely feasible? What are the best practices for consolidating resources across VMs?
Thank you almighty stackoverflow gurus for your prompt attention ;-)
Don't touch the WinSXS folder.
It's not as big as it looks (alot of it is hard links to duplicate files)
If you wanted to have consolidated space, use differencing disks--create one VM with Windows on it, and then use that disk as the basis for the rest. Each disk will only store the delta between the original and where that VM goes after that.
It is not possible to share WinSxS folders across installations.
If you want to know more about how WinSxS works, check out my blog post: http://fearthecowboy.com/post/CoApp-FAQ-Can-you-explain-how-Side-by-side-%28WinSxS%29-works.aspx
I'm working on a windows platform and want to be able to auto sync my files one way 'on change' to my virtual windows or linux web server - also need to be able to filter file types. i can connect to the remote machine via network drives.
i'm ideally looking for a free, easy to set up solution - a commercial product that does what I need is called ViceVersa but its a little overkill and costs :)
Thanks
Josh
I'd use rsync - simple, easy to setup, and provides the filters you need. Also very low on bandwidth after the first pass.
Here is a link explaining how to get it working in Windows
Whilst rsync doesn't allow 'on-change' auto-syncing, it is very fast when it scans a sync'ed directory (even very large ones), so you could schedule a frequent sync to overcome this.
Edit: You could combine it with a program like this, to trigger an rsync on folder contents change. Cheaper than viceversa
For other users, its worth mentioning lsyncd, it will auto sync on changes between two machines (by default deferring to rsync). Will only work on Linux though, but if thats not a problem it works great.
It also seems that Sparkleshare has finally released some working code (Dropbox clone). Havent tried it myself but does cross-platform synching and you can setup your own server.
I am thinking about a script/program that can run in background, and attempt to backup or synchronize a given filesystem path to a mirror location (probably located on an external/separate storage device).
This should apply to Windows but it could as well be used under Linux.
Differential/incremental backups are a bonus.
Windows System State backups are a bonus too.
Keeping the origin free of meta-data is essential. (unlike version control)
Searching by file or activity date could be interesting (like version control)
Backup repositories should be easy to browse and take little space.
Deleted files should be available for recovery for a period of time.
Windows Backup is tedious and bloated and limited.
Tar-gzipping is not accessible.
User interaction during backup should be nonexistent.
Amanda is the ultimate full-featured open-source backup solution, and there's a (relatively) new Zmanda Windows Client.
Duplicity is free and creates encrypted, incremental, compressed offsite backups. It's a linux app, but you could run it in cygwin or a small virtual machine.
I've written a perl script that runs it via a cronjob to backup several very big directories over DSL and it works great.
Check out AJCBackup. Does an excellent job at a good price.
Acronis True Image is great. It's not free but the Home edition is pretty cheap for what it does and it works reliably. Does image- and file- based backups, scheduling, instant backup of chosen folders accessible from explorer context menu, incremental/differential backups, can mount the backup files as Windows volumes and browse them, copy files out etc. It has saved my ass a few times already.
I admit this is not strictly a programming question, although I do use my WHS as a source repository server for home projects, and I'm guessing many other coders here do as well.
Does anyone have a recommendation for a good backup solution for the non-fileshare portion of Windows Home Server? All the WHS backups I've seen handle the fileshares, but none of the system files or other administrative stuff on the box.
Thanks,
Andy
Windows Home Server is designed to not need a backup of the OS. If your system drive fails, install a new drive, and then boot the WHS OS setup disc and install the OS. It will find the data on the other drives and recreate all the shared folders. You do need to do some configuring once it is back up but that is pretty small compared to not having to back it up.
One good solution for backing up the home server itself is to attach an external drive, say via USB 2.0 or eSATA. For this to work, though, you need the supporting software like Norton Ghost or something similar installed on your WHS server.
Windows Home Server Power Pack 1 (aka WHS PP1) added a feature to perform backups of the WHS shared folders to an external drive -- as you mention, this feature is only intended to do the data side and not the OS.
If you have an HP MediaSmart server, you could try the method mentioned in Quick & Easy Windows Home Server Backup and Restore. The author said it worked for him, but of course, caveat emptor. This technique has you creating a disk-image for your backup, and using that to restore from in the Recovery Disk / Restore disk process.
If you want a faster way to recover your OS and you do not have a Media Smart server, you can also check out these instructions on how to use a USB flash drive for installing WHS, and merge in the instructions found above for restoring a disk image vis-à-vis the OS Recovery disk process.
WHS OS backup solved by running two copies of WHS each on its own computer in a virtual machine with each WHS backing up the other (running in a VM makes the WHS a file thus able to be backed up and restored by WHS).
iDrive is Great and free under 2 gigs