[BBLISA] Backup Windows systems to samba?

[Rich Braun]

Ned Harvey pointed out:
> Crashplan is cool for certain purposes, but Dan specifically said
> he requires the ability to do a bare metal restore.  I don't know why

Alas bare-metal restores are really-really-really hard. No software company is
investing in creating that capability these days.

At work I'm going down the path of the "Netflix model" for cloud deployment,
which I used to detest but am gradually warming up to.  It involves baking a
golden-image for every scenario, which was a logistical nightmare with past
server-admin techniques but given the ability to store thousands or even tens
of thousands of AMI images without any meaningful admin overhead, the Netflix
model is starting to carry the day for server admins.

It occurs to me that this model completely eliminates the need to do
bare-metal recovery, ever.  You launch whatever current version of the image
you have (and using jenkins continuous-delivery, you always have a current
image, along with all the old saved ones), and restore user data onto that
(also using jenkins CI/CD).

The question is how to apply this concept to a small-office suite of laptops
or desktops.  Microsoft hasn't ever really provided a tool to deal with this,
and you can't restore a machine's files without also dealing with the infernal
registry.

What I do for myself is always run Windows inside a virtual machine, which
lives in a LVM under Linux or a file under Mac OS X.  Making a "bare-metal"
restore consists of backing up the Linux host instance (which I keep as
"vanilla" as possible) and making a volume snapshot of the Windows image.

Won't work for every site but if I started up a new company today and had to
support Windows, I'd tell my users tough-nuggies if they wanted a bare-metal
Windows laptop: you're getting a virtual machine running under OS X, and we're
sending volume snapshots to a central server someplace.  I challenge Microsoft
to come up with a better way, 'cause this kinda sucks.

-rich