Re: PC Backup to IFS

[Scott Klement <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> In looking for a better way of backing up PCs, I looked thru the archives.
> Among the possibilities was using the regular windows backup and backing it
> up to a file on the IFS, then use a SAV of the IFS to the iSeries tape
> drive. I decided to try it with a backup of my PC that would take approx
> 1gb.

The immediate question that pops to mind is "how the heck are you going to
restore?" You'll have to reinstall Windows and set up networking in order
to do the restore -- and I wonder if that really buys you anything over
reinstalling everything in the first place.

What I do is make my backups from a custom-built FreeBSD CD. This is a
bootable CD that runs FreeBSD entirely off of the CD-ROM. It uses the TAR
utility from FreeBSD in conjunction with a program that I wrote to copy
the data from the PC's hard drive to the iSeries tape drive.  (It never
stores data on the iSeries DASD, it goes straight to the tape drive.)

I store a copy of the CD with the backup tapes, so when I want to restore,
I format the hard drive, then boot the CD and restore all of the files
back to the hard drive. Remove the CD, and it boots up Windows exactly as
it was configured when I did the backup.

The downside to this approach is that FreeBSD has poor support for writing
to NTFS partitions, so I have to make sure the PCs are formatted with
FAT32.

ANYWAY... back to your 1gb problem...  I don't see why 1gb would be an
issue, but I know that the IFS APIs have problems handling a file that's
larger than 2gb unless you use the special "large file support" APIs. Is
it possible that this is the problem you're running into?  (Maybe
NetServer uses the interface with the 2gb limit under the covers.)  If so,
I doubt that there's anything you can do, aside from ask IBM to fix it.