file accessibility and copying/archive/...

[Sylvain RICHARD]

Hugh Sasse wrote:
> Trying to copy a windows XP NTFS drive to a big disk using cygwin tools
> I encounter inaccessible files such as ntusers.dat.  tar is not
> particularly verbose about why things fail so I wrote something in
> Ruby, but I only got about 70% of the contents of the disk across.
> I suspect this is a common problem, but don't know how to frame it
> correctly to extract something useful from Google.  The setup in
> question only has the one PC so things like rsync are out.  Windows
> keeps some things in use, but I don't know what.  Can anyone point
> me at the specific thing I should be reading, or suggest anything?
Hugh,

If you must do an online copy, the only solution is the "Volume Shadow 
Copy" API, especially designed to allow copying files in use. But you 
can copy garbage (especially for databases).

An offline solution based upon a bootable linux distribution (knoopix or 
others) might be better suited to your needs. I suggest dd_rescue if you 
want to copy whole partitions.

A commercial offering would be Ghost.

Best regards

    Sylvain RICHARD

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