P
Philip Herlihy
One of my customers (one of the rare few I can persuade to run backups
at all) wants to keep an additional copy on a further disk, just to be
on the safe side.
Now, you wouldn't want to re-configure the destination and run the
Backup program again, as that would break the sequence of Baseline and
Incrementals in the main backup location. So it's better to copy the
files.
However, those files are created with permissions which prevent the user
from accessing them (for understandable reasons) without changing
ownership and access rights - not something many people are comfortable
doing.
I've been trying to come up with something he can run without having to
think about it too hard.
One possibility is to run a baseline from time to time directed to the
additional location, immediately followed by a new baseline to the main
backup store - but that doesn't allow him to duplicate all the
subsequent inrementals.
Another is to use something like Acronis True Image (which somehow
manages to acquire all the permissions it needs) to clone the main
backup store to the additional location - possibly using True Image's
own Incremental facility. Hmmm...
I'm inclining to writing him a command-line script which will first
traverse the main backup store using takeown and icacls to make sure the
user has sufficient permissions, and then use something like Robocopy to
duplicate the files - Robocopy usefully skips files already copied. One
problem with such a script is that if the additional store is on USB it
may end up with a different drive letter (we don't have the Pro version,
so we can't use a network location). Maybe if the script resides on the
external disk I could get it to be drive-letter independent.
Or I guess we could enable the built-in Administrator account and have
him use that to run the copy. Actually - experimenting a bit - an
elevated command window does seem to be able to access these folders and
files, so maybe a plain Robocopy script (run with elevation) is the way
to go?
Any thoughts? Any hazards?
at all) wants to keep an additional copy on a further disk, just to be
on the safe side.
Now, you wouldn't want to re-configure the destination and run the
Backup program again, as that would break the sequence of Baseline and
Incrementals in the main backup location. So it's better to copy the
files.
However, those files are created with permissions which prevent the user
from accessing them (for understandable reasons) without changing
ownership and access rights - not something many people are comfortable
doing.
I've been trying to come up with something he can run without having to
think about it too hard.
One possibility is to run a baseline from time to time directed to the
additional location, immediately followed by a new baseline to the main
backup store - but that doesn't allow him to duplicate all the
subsequent inrementals.
Another is to use something like Acronis True Image (which somehow
manages to acquire all the permissions it needs) to clone the main
backup store to the additional location - possibly using True Image's
own Incremental facility. Hmmm...
I'm inclining to writing him a command-line script which will first
traverse the main backup store using takeown and icacls to make sure the
user has sufficient permissions, and then use something like Robocopy to
duplicate the files - Robocopy usefully skips files already copied. One
problem with such a script is that if the additional store is on USB it
may end up with a different drive letter (we don't have the Pro version,
so we can't use a network location). Maybe if the script resides on the
external disk I could get it to be drive-letter independent.
Or I guess we could enable the built-in Administrator account and have
him use that to run the copy. Actually - experimenting a bit - an
elevated command window does seem to be able to access these folders and
files, so maybe a plain Robocopy script (run with elevation) is the way
to go?
Any thoughts? Any hazards?