Questions on PBA

[Blueracer]

I've been to the PBABackup section on the Wiki and I have a few questions.
1. How do you start up PBA? I don't see it listed as a menu item in Fedora.
2. The first step listed on the wiki says "Simply boot your machine from the network". How do you do that? I am using Amahi for DHCP & DNS.
3. Does this backup Vista & XP machines also?

[cpg]

I've been to the PBABackup section on the Wiki and I have a few questions.
1. How do you start up PBA? I don't see it listed as a menu item in Fedora.

you boot your machine off the network.

2. The first step listed on the wiki says "Simply boot your machine from the network". How do you do that? I am using Amahi for DHCP & DNS.

some machines need to have this enabled in the BIOS. some more recent machines require you to press F12. you can also set it up to automatically boot from the network with PXE boot.

3. Does this backup Vista & XP machines also?

whatever is on the disk. for ntfs and ext3 partitions, PBA backs up with optimization (only disk used is backed up, not empty space) and compression.

please do make sure the machine was shut down properly, i.e. that the file system is completely flushed. otherwise the cloning engine will fail (it cannot modify your disk itself!).

[moredruid]

cpg, technically there are a few caveats regarding filesystems. Some hidden filesystem types will not be recognized by the pba script and can therefore not be copied.

But usually it works

[Blueracer]

cpg,
I still don't get the part on the network boot. Do I physically go to each computer on my system and reboot them or am I doing something at the Amahi server to reboot them.

[gmw]

cpg,
I still don't get the part on the network boot. Do I physically go to each computer on my system and reboot them or am I doing something at the Amahi server to reboot them.

You have to reboot each computer with a network boot.
To make your machines network boot you most likely have to make changes in the BIOS (when you press DEL shortly after powering up the machine there should be a setting for "network boot")

When the machine does this the HDA gives it instructions to boot into a special backup program .... and copies the entire contents of the hard drive to the HDA!

[relrobber]

Blue:

a network boot is where your computer downloads and runs an operating system from a server (the HDA) instead of booting the operating system on it's local drive (Windows), essentially making your computer a thin client.

[Blueracer]

I have one computer on my network that is newer and has the network boot option in the bios. I enabled it. I then went to a terminal screen in the amahi server and issued the commands:dhclient eth0
wget -q -O- http://pba/pba.tgz | tar -xzf - -C /root && sh pba/pba.sh pba
These are the commands shown on the PBA web server page. I received error messages on both commands. Is it possible that PBA isn't even installed yet?
I noticed on some of the Amahi Theme examples that the "Storage" screens had menu items for Drives, Monitor, Shares & Backup. I do not have the Shares & Backup menu items. Sorry for being a pain but I can't seem to get it working.

[gmw]

I have one computer on my network that is newer and has the network boot option in the bios. I enabled it. I then went to a terminal screen in the amahi server and issued the commands:dhclient eth0
wget -q -O- http://pba/pba.tgz | tar -xzf - -C /root && sh pba/pba.sh pba
These are the commands shown on the PBA web server page. I received error messages on both commands. Is it possible that PBA isn't even installed yet?
I noticed on some of the Amahi Theme examples that the "Storage" screens had menu items for Drives, Monitor, Shares & Backup. I do not have the Shares & Backup menu items. Sorry for being a pain but I can't seem to get it working.

It is possible that PBA is not installed yet (it is a "legacy" application that needs to be ported to one-click install.
We have the "old" application install page at http://hda/myapps
Go there, find PBA and click the icon to install it...
DO NOT try to install other apps this way -- it may cause you some problems!

[Blueracer]

gmw,
Thanks for helping me out. Ok, I installed it and then clicked on the icon. A screen comes up called "Amahi Personal Backup". It says:
No backups found. Once you perform one backup, you will see something like the image below.
See how to perform full disk backups with PBA!
See other ways to perform backups with your Amahi HDA!
I then entered the commands I listed in the previous post in a terminal screen, but still got error messages.

[gmw]

Forget the command line (not relevent)
Next step is to network boot your machine (the one you want to backup) ... then follow the on screen instructions.

After the backup is complete when you use the url http://pba you will see the file with the backup!

Almost there ...