S
Syl
How do I view the contents of an NTbackup file?
M
Mark Adams
Syl said:
By restoring it to the computer that created it.
T
Twayne
Syl said:
With ntbackup.exe. In Restore mode it'll show you everything in the
backup that you could Restore/choose from to Restore. It'll give you an
explorer like window, same as when you backed them up.
Or, depending on what you're looking for, a plain old text editor but
you can't Restore anything that way. Only ntbackup can do the actual
Restore after you've selected what to restore.
HTH,
Twayne`
T
Twayne
Mark Adams said:
Although that's one way it's far from the best. Just use ntbackup's
Restore feature to look at the list of files/folders in the backup and
choose at will. No need to restore anything if you don't want to, or
restore a file, a folder, or several of each, or the whole drive. A
complete restore of the boot drive requires the ASR disk for that backup
set.
HTH,
Twayne`
S
Syl
Not interested in a restore --- I am only interested in viewing!!!
S
Syl
Ah ha! That is what I was looking for. Thanks!
You think they might tell in the documentation or even on the MS knowledge
base
T
Twayne
Syl said:Ah ha! That is what I was looking for. Thanks!
You think they might tell in the documentation or even on the MS
knowledge base
But, but, but ... the engineers that wrote the Help file already KNOW
that, why say it again? < grin >
Actually they do tell you, but finding it is another story.
Twayne`
P
Paul
perl said:
This is all I could find in a quick search. Apparently it's a tool that
translates .bkf into .tar, and then you could use something like "tar t"
to create the file list.
http://savvyadmin.com/extract-nt-backup-files-in-linux-using-mtftar/
The readme file...
http://gpl.internetconnection.net/mtftar.readme
This doc is supposed to describe the basic format of MTF.
Apparently .bkf is related.
http://laytongraphics.com/mtf/MTF_100a.PDF
This statement, casually mentions the relationship.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backup_Exec
"Backup Exec shares the same Microsoft Tape Format with
Windows' built-in NTBackup."
Just a guess,
Paul
P
Paul
Paul said:
I had a chance to test this. I downloaded mtftar.tar.gz on a
Linux machine.
gzip -c -d mtftar.tar.gz | tar xf -
cd mtftar
make
The resulting file does not need to be installed. It doesn't
need to be run as "root" either, if the backup file is just
sitting on a disk.
The first test I tried, was "pulling" the file from the Windows
machine via SAMBA. That failed miserably.
When I copied the file via SAMBA, to a Linux directory, then
the test passed.
If you were sitting in the same mtftar directory above, with the
binary file "mtftar" sitting in the directory, and in the same
directory, you'd downloaded the Backup.bkf file, the command looks
like this. This is how I created the output listing. The first
part of the command, translates from mtf format to tar format, and
the "tar tf" part does a "listing" of the tar file being streamed.
./mtftar < Backup.bkf | tar tf -
To test this, I used the ntbackup utility in Windows, to create a
small (90MB) test .bkf file. And this was the output from the test
(this is just the first part of the output).
C:
C:/Downloads/oem3sr2_nfi_exe_disk_utility
C:/Downloads/oem3sr2_nfi_exe_disk_utility/oem3sr2.zip
C:/Downloads/oem3sr2_nfi_exe_disk_utility/starthere.htm
C:/Downloads/oem3sr2_nfi_exe_disk_utility/genedump
C:/Downloads/oem3sr2_nfi_exe_disk_utility/genedump/4.0
C:/Downloads/oem3sr2_nfi_exe_disk_utility/genedump/4.0/dbghelp.dll
C:/Downloads/oem3sr2_nfi_exe_disk_utility/genedump/4.0/genedump.exe
C:/Downloads/oem3sr2_nfi_exe_disk_utility/genedump/5.0
C:/Downloads/oem3sr2_nfi_exe_disk_utility/genedump/5.0/dbghelp.dll
C:/Downloads/oem3sr2_nfi_exe_disk_utility/genedump/5.0/genedump.exe
So the translation produces absolute paths, with forward slash characters
for delimiters. When this output was created on the Linux machine,
it had to be opened in Wordpad and re-saved as a .txt file, to correct
the line termination character difference.
So it does appear that the code does a decent job in a modest test.
If you can translate the code in a Windows environment, you may be
able to achieve similar results, with no Linux machines.
When I created the Backup.bkf, I select the "oem3sr2_nfi_exe_disk_utility"
directory as the thing to back up. And the above output, does identify
the exact location of the original files.
HTH,
Paul
A
alexleee62
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D
David H. Lipman
From: <[email protected]>
Dredging up old posts, such as 2009, with a suggestion of a web site is spam
Dredging up old posts, such as 2009, with a suggestion of a web site is spam
A
Andy
I don't think anything beats an image backup.
Andy
D
David H. Lipman
From: "Andy said:
It depends. With backup software extracting a file, folder or a groups of files is
relatively easy. When a system is "imaged" it is usually restored as an image and
extracting a file, folder or a groups of files is not always very easy with each
applicxation providing various levels of providing that capability.
Thus it is a combination of imaging and backups that may be best.
P
Paul
David said:
Without descending into a "definition war", some of
the backup tools I've used, there are options for
opening the single big backup file and browsing it.
Macrium Reflect allows mounting the .mrimg file for inspection.
System Image from Windows 7 or Windows 8, is a .vhd file,
and VHDMount or the built-in mounter in Windows 8 allows browsing.
And I found some sort of converter a couple years ago (written
by some non-pro software developer), which would convert NTBackup
into something I could browse later. There's probably a couple options
for that format.
So don't give up. Where there is a will, there is a way.
And even if you possess only a sector level copy of a partition,
there is a tool out there to convert a sector level copy of
a disk, into a .vhd file, and from there is can be mounted
for random access. Isn't the world a wonderful place ?
Too bad it takes so much Googling to find crap like that.
For the last tool, I can't even remember what I did with
that one
The thing is, a fixed-size VHD file, is very close to being
a sector copy of a hard drive. All it takes, is adding a couple of
KB of info at the head and the tail of the file, to convert it
to a certain flavor of VHD (which can then be mounted). It's not
exactly the same as a dynamic VHD (commonly used in VirtualBox
or VPC2007), which grows in size as you add more files. But I was
impressed by how little the conversion process, was modifying the
original file.
Paul
A
Andy
You are right.
I left out the other things I do as well.
I have a batch file that runs on each startup and zips and copies new and changed files to an external drive.
And I use Erunt to backup the registry.
Andy