TeraByte Unlimited

I used to make backups on a home LAN to a samba server created by the WD NAS device I was using. However, I don't have it any longer, though I can't honestly say I am terribly disappointed about it because it seemed to require to much hand-holding for its simple enough functionality. Even so, the backups were handy. Now I have a huge USB device attached directly to the main workstation for making much easier backups. It does not have any kind of server OS for accepting connections as the NAS did.

I would like to be able to back up from another machine on the LAN to either it or to the main workstation's HD, which is large enough to hold the backed-up data temporarily before I move it to the USB device. On this main workstation I have Windows 7 Professional installed as the primary OS, but I also have VirtualBox installed on it with a number of different OS's, including various Linux and Windows.

It seems to me that I could easily enough (possibly with Linux?) install a samba server or some other kind of server recognizable by IFW/IFL within one of the virtual machines on VBox so that I could make a whole-disk backup from the separate physical machine onto the hard disk of the virtual machine while my main machine is also running (even while I am working on it) and the separate machine were booted into the IFL CD environment.

If I created the virtual hard disk large enough, why would something like that not work? Or would there be a better solution using Windows itself, one I am not aware of? I am not entirely clear on which other servers are within the capabilities of, or can be recognized by, the IFL CD program.

Why don't you just share the large USB drive? IFL can back up to Windows shares.

You know, I could really kick myself right now! I did not understand that IFL would allow me to use the Windows Shares in this way because, when I looked at the Mount Network Shares dialogue after booting into the CD environment, I (mis)interpreted the information on the top line saying "Samba/Windows servers detected: 0". However, just now when I tried the procedure to "Auto Detect SMB Servers", sure enough it found it okay. I did not make the connection between putting the share on one computer and having it be seen as a Windows Server on another. I expected that I would need to be running a Windows Server OS. That's awesome.

Will this same sort of configuration be possible with the Linux machines on this network? I mean, can I boot into the IFL CD operating system on one of the Linux machines and backup its disk or partitions to this same USB device, or would I need to make additional configuration settings to do so?

It works the same way. When you're booted to IFL it doesn't matter what OS is installed since it's running Linux from the IFL media.

On Wed, 1 May 2013 22:20:48 PDT, just as I was about to take a herb,
TeraByte Support(PP) disturbed my reverie and wrote:

>Why don't you just share the large USB drive? IFL can back up to Windows shares.
>
So can IfW .
--

Cheers,

DrT

** Stress - the condition brought about by having to
** resist the temptation to beat the living daylights
** out of someone who richly deserves it.

"So can IfW"

That is helpful too, thanks. However, in this case the backup has to be done offline, not while Windows is running, because the underlying data is on an encrypted disk, and I prefer not to encrypt the backup separately in those cases where I need a whole disk image. As far as I know, IFW works only while Windows is running.

You can use IFW outside of Windows in WinPE builds -- TBWinRE or TBWinPE, for example.