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Application/Web Server | Challenge Entry Appliance | Consumer

Personal Backup Appliance

Use this VM to Backup, Restore, or Clone the Hard Disk Drive of any Computer or VM over the Network!

Description

There's a newer version! Click on this link to download the latest version:

*** Download Latest Version of this Appliance ***
Size: ~205MB

Note: The "Download this Appliance" torrent link in the box above is for v1.0.0.

Read below and please also visit the *** Personal Backup Appliance User Guide with Screenshots *** for detailed info on the hard disk drive backup and restore feature.

1. The Personal Backup Appliance (PBA) provides -TWO- crucial backup functions.

Hard Disk Backup and Restore
First, the Personal Backup Appliance provides a simple user-friendly interface to backup and restore entire hard disk drives over the network. This functionality is similar to that of commercial products such as Norton Ghost Server, but there is no added cost for additional software or hardware. This feature simplifies consumer hard disk backup, streamlines OS deployment in corporate IT environments, and provides a simple harness to backup and restore virtual machines in VMPlayer. Such a setup on physical hardware would require a non-trivial amount of time to set up on top of hardware costs. The intended audience is any consumer that wants a no-hassles backup solution. All you need to do is power on the VM, and then boot from the client on the system that you want to backup.

NAS Device
Second, the Personal Backup Appliance provides a simple NAS service for drag-and-drop incremental backup through Windows (SMB) shares. When coupled with helper backup software such as SyncToy (free download for Windows) or rsync, the PBA can provide similar functionality to commercial hardware products such as the Mirra Personal Server in addition to standard NAS services.

2. The Personal Backup Appliance is built from VMware's Browser Appliance. I manually installed the Partition Image daemon, and used apt-get to install the rest of the software, that I've listed above, from Ubuntu repositories. I also upgraded the VMware Guest Tools to the latest version and ran the shrink disk feature a few times. The bulk of the work is in the shell scripts that I wrote to process the MBR, the partition table, and to serially call partition image to process partition data. To make things easier for the judges, I spent a lot of time writing documentation and providing downloads from within the Virtual machine to easily set things up on the client end. I also configured Samba to provide NAS functionality. There was also manual tweaking of the vmx file.

3. Instructions

Do this from a arbitrary system on your network that you want to use as the server:

  1. Extract zip file
  2. Open the Personal-Backup-Appliance.vmx file using VMware Player.
  3. After booting up, Firefox will automatically launch and display the appliance's IP address. Read the instructions on this page.
  4. From another machine, go to the website hosted by the appliance and download the client cd iso image. Burn this iso image to a CD.

Do this from the system that you want to backup:

  1. Boot from the client CD on the computer that you want to backup.
  2. The client will automatically launch. Then follow the instructions on the screen.

4.

  • Partition Image http://www.partimage.org GPL
  • Ubuntu Linux GPL
  • My BASH and CGI scripts GPL
  • vsftpd GPL
  • Samba GPL
  • Slax Frodo 5.15 http://www.slax.org GPL
  • INSERT Linux http://www.inside-security.de/insert_en.html GPL
  • VMware ToolBox VMware
  • Cherokee Web Server GPL
  • Mozilla Firefox GPL
  • The scripts that I wrote for this were inspired by the things I learned while working on the LinImage Project http://sourceforge.net/projects/linimage
  • Other Miscellaneous Open Source Software
  • ntfsclone http://www.linux-ntfs.org/ GPL
  • Device Image http://www.device-image.de/ GPL

Last updated: 04/25/2007

Operating system: Ubuntu Linux Dapper Drake 6.06.1 LTS

Applications installed:
VMware Browser Appliance 1.0.0 Ubuntu Linux 5.10 Mozilla Firefox 1.0.7 & 1.5.0 Partition Image 0.6.4 vsftpd 2.0.3-1ubuntu1 Cherokee Web Server 0.4.23-2 Samba 3.0.14a-6ubuntu1 VMware ToolBox 19175 BASH and CGI scripts that I wrote Backup of Damn Small Linux (DSL) archived on the VM Client CD iso image based on Slax Frodo 5.15 Client CD iso image based on INSERT Linux 1.3.6 ntfsclone 1.13.1 from Linux-NTFS project zsplit/unzsplit 1.2.0 from Device Image Other Misc Open Source Software

VMware Tools installed: Yes

Size: 205 MB
Torrent available: Yes
(What is BitTorrent?)

Primary account
Username: vmware
Password: vmware

Submitted by: rxhui

Download link provided by the submitter, not VMware. Report broken downloads here.


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