file accessibility and copying/archive/...

[Hugh Sasse]

On Tue, 15 Apr 2008, Sylvain RICHARD wrote:

> 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"

OK, I'll google that.

> API, especially designed to allow copying files in use. But you can copy
> garbage (especially for databases).

They end up as impenetrable blobs of binary, or they actually get corrupted?
> 
> An offline solution based upon a bootable linux distribution (knoopix or

Right, I have a knoppix CD (I note that the new ones are DVD now, but don't
know how much NTFS support has improved since 5.1. But that's going OT for
this list)

> others) might be better suited to your needs. I suggest dd_rescue if you want
> to copy whole partitions.

I want to extract the non-system files at some point.
> 
> A commercial offering would be Ghost.

Ha!  I had version 2 of ghost for backups on that machine. I
"upgraded" to 2005 (I forget the exact version) and it no longer
worked.  Also the incremental backup would only work to another hard
disk.  I used to do incremental backups (to tape) in the days of Sun
3 workstations.  So why it wouldn't work to removable media...
Unless they have improved things dramatically, my inclination is to
avoid ghost, and I don't think it will let me extract individual
files, directories from the backup afterwards anyway.

> 
> Best regards
> 
>    Sylvain RICHARD
> 
        Thank you,
        Hugh

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