Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Look for Personal Backup Appliance 1.1.0 on 12/17

I've been busy working on the next release of Personal Backup Appliance. Previously, I mentioned that I would do a test release in early December, but I'm not going to do that anymore. With all the new features, it's complicated to generate a patch release that will apply nicely over 1.0.2. However, I decided on a release date for version 1.1.0. Personal Backup Appliance 1.1.0 will be released on December 17th.

2 comments:

ìgbàlonígbàńlò said...

Hi,
Great product. However I have one question. I need to virtualize an installation that takes up an entire 250GB of disk space. I intend to use knoppix qparted or some other such utility to partition most of the empty space. I've used the appliance but I don't see an option to either backup select partitions or if the whole drive was backed up an option to restore only select partitions. Can this be done? This way I can shrink this installation into a smaller than 250GB VM

rxhui said...

Thanks! At present, there is no option to backup and restore selected partitions. The new version that I'm working on supports this at its core, but I may not have time to add it as a nice menu option before the 17th. This is what you can do in the meantime. I'm making some assumptions about your set up, so please correct me if I'm assuming the wrong thing or if I'm not understanding your problem.

1. Shrink the partition(s) using gparted or equivalent to create empty space at the end of the disk. Delete all partitions that have no data.
2. Leave some unallocated disk space at the end of the disk.
3. Do the PBA backup. It will ignore the empty space.
4. Create VM with adequate disk space. It only needs to be big enough to hold the partitions that you backed up.
5. Restore to VM.
6. The VM should have some empty space at the end of the disk. You can create the partitions that you need on the VM.

Hope this helps.