Transfering initial remote image backup on laptop (or USB disk) with help of a Virtual Machine

general discussion
1

Hi

I wanted to do remote image backups (not only file backups). Since the initial backup would take up to a week I was thinking about doing the first backup differently. I was just wondering if you think that would work, or if there are any other tricks necessary. My plan was:

  • Going to the remote site with a Laptop with an UrBackup Server installed on it.
  • Do a Full image backup of the client onto that laptop
  • Come back to our local site, restore the full image backup into a virtual machine
  • connect the virtual machine to the local UrBackup Server and do a Full image backup
  • Now delete the virtual machine and configure the remote (original) client to connect over the internet with the local urbackup server. Now Urbackup server shouldn’t be able to notice that that were two different machines, and will be able to do incremental image backups, is that right? Or did I forget something?
2

Should work, except the problematic step would be booting the Windows in the virtual machine. Windows often does not boot on different hardware.

3

yes, worked like a charm :-). Only one Windows didn’t want to boot, it didn’t like beeing transported from a xen virtual machine to a kvm one. The backup over the internet (even the image one) work perfectly now. Great program you’ve wrote.
It would be cool though, if there would be some kind of possibility to import backups.