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#344089 - 07/04/2011 12:12 Spending my day re-installing Windows
hybrid8
carpal tunnel

Registered: 12/11/2001
Posts: 7738
Loc: Toronto, CANADA
At some point yesterday, between mid-afternoon and 7PM, the boot drive on my Windows 7 based PVR just quit. Poof!

Luckily for me, I still had the previous boot drive with a Windows XP installation on it, complete with a working SageTV install. Missing only all my favorites (season pass) settings of the past year. I say "lucky" because this system is the only way to get TV in the house. This SageTV installation was also new enough that it supported a feature they released last year that reads TV show metadata directly from the recordings rather than relying on a central preference/data file. This allowed us to access all the recordings we had without issue.

About the biggest let-down was that by the time I noticed the issue it was close to 8pm. And by the time I got everything re-connected and booted, it was already almost 8:30. That means my wife missed 30 minutes of American Idol (only 1 decent performance) and Survivor. The internets will fix that last one.

It's going to be a bit of a PITA to recreate my favorites list and make sure I'm not missing anything. Mostly because I have to prune out a lot of older cruft that I'd already done on the newer SageTV install.

Today I'll dedicate two older 40GB PATA drives to a software mirror configuration, which will hold Windows 7 and SageTV.


I also want to run a repeating scheduled backup of a few files/folders, such as the SageTV installation/settings folder, which I'll copy over to my NAS. Are there any recommendations for setting this up? Especially useful would be something similar to Mac OS' Time Machine that gives me snapshots and updates only information that's changed.

_________________________
Bruno
Twisted Melon : Fine Mac OS Software

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#344091 - 07/04/2011 14:09 Re: Spending my day re-installing Windows [Re: hybrid8]
tanstaafl.
carpal tunnel

Registered: 08/07/1999
Posts: 5546
Loc: Ajijic, Mexico
Originally Posted By: hybrid8
About the biggest let-down was that by the time I noticed the issue it was close to 8pm. And by the time I got everything re-connected and booted, it was already almost 8:30. That means my wife missed 30 minutes of American Idol (only 1 decent performance) and Survivor.
I'm sorry, Bruno, but I just cannot relate to that. smile Two months ago I switched off the power strip that feeds my TV, DVD player, and wireless headphone set. I had forgotten about it until a couple nights ago when I tried to play a DVD and nothing worked. It took me a moment to remember why.

It is just so incredibly liberating not to be chained to that idiot box, and I used to be a serious television Tivo addict (30+ hours a week!). But, different strokes and all that...

tanstaafl.
_________________________
"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"

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#344092 - 07/04/2011 14:31 Re: Spending my day re-installing Windows [Re: tanstaafl.]
hybrid8
carpal tunnel

Registered: 12/11/2001
Posts: 7738
Loc: Toronto, CANADA
I'm not sure I'd watch much TV if I lived in Mexico either. wink As it stands, I just watch a couple of hours before heading to bed.
_________________________
Bruno
Twisted Melon : Fine Mac OS Software

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#344093 - 07/04/2011 15:31 Re: Spending my day re-installing Windows [Re: hybrid8]
drakino
carpal tunnel

Registered: 08/06/1999
Posts: 7868
Time Machine works off a pretty basic concept. The idea is that every backup looks like a full backup on disk, and they are divided up into timestamp based folders. Behind the scenes, hard links join together all the identical files, ensuring only one actual copy is taking up space. If data changes, it just copies the new file over and future backups hard link to it.

Rsync can replicate this setup pretty easily, the challenge from Windows is ensuring the backup destination supports hard links. If you enable SSH access on your ReadyNAS, rsync can run via that and just hard link without concerns about SMB setup possibly mucking it up. I'd recommend creating a read only SMB share to allow reading back the data when needed. I've seen Windows do weird things to hard linked files via Samba, where instead of breaking the hard link if a file changes, it updates all linked files.

Here is a script I use to backup files every 4 hours. The way it handles pruning old backups is a closed loop that runs for a week. Each backup is stashed in a folder like Mon/04. Thats the backup from Monday, at 4am.

Code:
thisday=$(date +%a)
lastday=$(date --date='4 hours ago' +%a)
thishour=$(date +%H)
lasthour=$(date --date='4 hours ago' +%H)

rsync -av --delete --link-dest=/c/backup/mail/$lastday/$lasthour/  /var/vmail backupuser@nas:/c/backup/mail/$thisday/$thishour/


The key thing in that is --link-dest. That should point at the last backup, and rsync will create hard links from that last backup for any identical data. /var/mail is the source, then the last file path is the destination for the current backup.

The above code is a bash script, but it should be pretty easy to adopt this to Powershell, and use an rsync for windows binary. Or you can go the cygwin path.

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#344111 - 08/04/2011 04:13 Re: Spending my day re-installing Windows [Re: drakino]
Roger
carpal tunnel

Registered: 18/01/2000
Posts: 5683
Loc: London, UK
Originally Posted By: drakino
Rsync can replicate this setup pretty easily


For my Linux boxes, I use rsnapshot, which does this automatically.
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-- roger

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#344121 - 08/04/2011 18:49 Re: Spending my day re-installing Windows [Re: Roger]
canuckInOR
carpal tunnel

Registered: 13/02/2002
Posts: 3212
Loc: Portland, OR
Originally Posted By: Roger
I use rsnapshot, which does this automatically.

Thanks. I've been needing something, and hadn't gotten around to wading through the options or rolling my own, yet.

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