Okay so I just did a test run of Windows7 backup. I backed up 2 machines to a network file share, example: \\machine\BACKUP. The share is password protected, and when I did the backup on both machines, it prompted me for the username and password.
I backed up over 1TB of data between the 2 machines, and verified that the data was on the remote file system. Now, as we all know (or should know!), backups are useless unless you can restore them, so there is no peace of mind unless you are fairly confident that the backup can be restored. So, I decided to do a test restore on one of the machines. Long story short I am unable to restore the data! It seems the restore process does NOT prompt for authentication of a remote share like the backup process does! It just fails with the error "wrong username or password", I guess it's trying to use the local credentials instead of the remoteuser\remotepass I used when I did the backup. So, to try and get around it, I made a symlink to the backup dir in a public readable share. That did not work, it said that it could find no backup there. I thought maybe it does not like symlinks, so I then did a "mount --bind /dir/BACKUP /publicdir/BACKUP", and that also failed, again saying it could not find the backup, even though I could browse to the dir and see the backup directory. I checked file and directory permissions and they are fine. So in short, I am unable to restore the data. It's a good thing I tested it! I'm not sure what is going on here, but I do know that: 1. The restore process does not allow you to enter auth like the backup process does. 2. If the data is moved to any other path than what it was saved to, it will refuse to recognize it. This could be a big problem if a backup dir is archived or moved elsewhere and later put online in another path and thus unable to restore it. Any ideas?
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