Steps I took to get a backuppc server on an ubuntu 8.10 pc in order to be able to back up a windows vista business pc. I’ve only documented the non-obvious and undocumented items here.
- Added a user called backup to the vista pc.
- Added the backup user to the “administrators” group. I tried the “backup operators” group but it didn’t give access to the user profiles. It looks like robocopy has some black magic that allows it to bypass ACLs when a member of backup operators.
- Enabled admin shares (ie
\\machine\C$) by addingDWORDregistry keyLocalAccountTokenFilterPolicytoHKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Systemand setting the value to1. See How to access Administrative Shares on Vista (C$) by PaulSpoerry - Removed the
-Nfrom theSmbClientFullCmdetc options in backuppc’s transfer (xfer) settings as it didn’t seem to be using the provided password. Troubleshooting was aided by running/usr/share/backuppc/bin/BackupPC_dump -v -f vistamachinedirectly as user backuppc. - Hide the backup
user
from the welcome screen by adding
DWORDHKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\SpecialAccounts\UserList\backupwith value0to the registry. “backup” is the name of the user to hide,0means hide,1means show.
Enjoy.
See also:
Current status: This has only been partially successful so far. The backup runs but has lots of files missing due access denied errors on many of the important folders. It looks like I will have to manually give “backup operators” permissions to these folders. Sigh. Vista is proving to be less than easy for me to support.