EZ backup of Win95 ...

[Ulrich Babiak]

Hi there,

I think many of us have to struggle with all the "security"
holes in win95 - making it very easy for any user to 
mess around with system settings and files. While there are
lots of kiosk and security programs out there, most of them
are either expensive or do not address ALL the problems
created by the Win95 system design. And making backups
of complete Win95 systems is really painful ...

Here's something I came up with last night when I was
roaming around sleeplessly: You probably remember my
"Webserver on a disk" - a little Linux system fitted
on one single bootable floppy. Wouldn't it be great
to use this for backup purposes too? Like this:
- create a Linux partition on the user PC
  (so nobody can "see" it under Dos/Win95)
- booting the pc from the Linux disk
- backing up the complete Win partition onto the Linux
  partition (with dump? or afio?)

Nowadays, the harddisks are so large that it should be
easy to spend half their capacity for this purpose.
If somebody screws up the workstation, all you have to do is to
boot from the disk, clean the Win partition and restore
it from the "invisible" Linux partion. One could even
include a little shell script on the boot disk and automate
this process.

Are there any linux experts on this list who can comment on
this? Is it possible to recreate the complete Win partition
this way? Which backup utility would be the best, tar, afio,
dump or something else? And does anybody know whether this
works for the new VFAT32 file system?

I would be very interested in your ideas ....

Bye,
Ulrich

Ulrich Babiak                         StadtBibliothek Koeln
ubabiak at stbib-koeln.de               postbox at stbib-koeln.de
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