Personal Backup (VMware) Appliance

http://pba-vm.sourceforge.net

The Personal Backup Appliance (PBA) provides -TWO- crucial backup functions.

1. Hard Disk Backup and Restore

First, the Personal Backup Appliance provides a simple user-friendly interface to backup and restore entire hard disk drives over the network. This functionality is similar to that of commercial products such as Norton Ghost Server, but there is no added cost for additional software or hardware. This feature simplifies consumer hard disk backup, streamlines OS deployment in corporate IT environments, and provides a simple harness to backup and restore virtual machines in VMPlayer. Such a setup on physical hardware would require a non-trivial amount of time to set up on top of hardware costs.

2. NAS Device

Second, the Personal Backup Appliance provides a simple NAS service for drag-and-drop incremental backup through Windows (SMB) shares. When coupled with helper backup software such as SyncToy (free download for Windows) or rsync, the PBA can provide similar functionality to commercial hardware products such as the Mirra Personal Server in addition to standard NAS services. When the VM boots up, Firefox will automatically launch and display information and instructions on how to use this feature.

Getting Started

Do this from an arbitrary system on your network that you want to use as the server:
  1. Extract zip file
  2. Open the .vmx file using VMware Player.
  3. After booting up, default username and password will be displayed on the screen. Please take note of the IP address of your Personal Backup Appliance. Next, login, run 'pba-server-console', and select Help from the menu. Read it.
  4. From another machine (not the PBA), go to the website hosted by the appliance and download the client cd iso image. Burn this iso image to a CD.
Do this from the system that you want to backup:
  1. Boot from the client CD on the computer that you want to backup.
  2. The client will automatically launch. Then follow the instructions on the screen.

See 'Help screen' in 'pba-server-console' for more documentation.

About this VM

VM Appliance built by Roland Hui (rxhui@users.sourceforge.net)
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