Re: file accessibility and copying/archive/...

[Hugh Sasse <hgs at dmu dot ac dot uk>]

On Wed, 16 Apr 2008, Sylvain RICHARD wrote:

> Hugh Sasse wrote
> > 
> > Can it extract individual files from the backup?  I don't want to copy
> > old Windows System files on to the new machine when it appears.
> >   
> Ahah!
> 
> Finally, you tell us about what you intended to do in the first place!
> Could you be more specific, please?

I want to recover as much of the data I wrote to the old system onto
a portable drive (which being new is big, I forget how big now but of
the order of 200GB), and I want to put the files somewhere on my as yet
unbuilt new machine, which will probably be running Vista dual boot with
Ubuntu.  I don't want to end up with an extra copy of XP on the destination
system as Microsoft aren't exactly relaxed about licencing, so I'll need
to be able to extract the specific files I want afterwards.

What I did before was to write a recursive Ruby program to copy
files and log what didn't get copied.  Most other copying approaches
to solving this die on the first error.  I could get tar not to die,
but couldn't get it to tell me much about what failed or why.  I now
know more about that and why it is likely to fail in lots of cases,
not just ntuser.dat.

Trying to use the backup provided with windows (My\ Computer -> C:
-> Properties -> Tools -> Backup) which I see is ntbackup, was
tricky in the past: it doesn't work with CD RWs, only floppy disks,
or a big file, which I would have had to put on the same disk as I
was trying to back up.  With a new drive I shouldn't have that
problem.  (For some values of "shouldn't".)

So my current plan is to attempt to use NTbackup to do the job, possibly
through the toos -> backup dialogue in the first instance.

Hopefully that hasn't bored you to the point where you are UNcomfortably
numb... :-)
> 
>    Sylvain RICHARD
> 
        Thank you
        Hugh

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