EDIT: I’ve approved the spam below in this post (imported from my old Livejournal) because it is just so entertaining!

Well, it’s been a while snce I posted here. But this *is* my blog, so what better place than…

A couple of months back I switched to Ubuntu from Windows full time. (The main hard drive seemed about to fail, got a new HDD, made the formal Ubuntu switch, and found it was Windows support for the drive that was bad, the drive was fine.)

I was using a paid account at Mozy for backup (after a burglary in 2007 & losing six months of stuff, online can’t be stolen or lost in fires etc.). But there is no Ubuntu support for it.

I do have a minial Windows installation, but don’t want to switch to it just to perform backups. So eventually, I got it running under a VirtualBox Windows installation, but it’s not straightforward, so time for documentation.

The irony is, I’m not using it anymore, as it hangs for hours for no clear reason, with glitches (google around for more info; at $5/month I was willing to put up with them), but most importantly, it kept resetting the computer it was assigned to (you can only be assigned to one computer at a time), leaving me with no other option, even after tech support, but to start the backup process again.

I’m now using Crashplan , which is much more reliable, has a native Ubuntu version, and have just cut my losses with the remainder of my paid plan time.

Anyway, here we go:

• Setup VirtualBox with an XP installation as normal.
• Install Mozy with the latest version (1.12+) as the previous version didn’t work under a VM (I know, if you’re reading this you’re probably running a version later still, but just in case…)
• You now need Mozy to cope with the virtualized network. Under the Guest machine’s settings, under Network, set the Adapter Type to Intel Pro/100 T Server. Set ‘Attached To’ to ‘Host Interface’. Using NAT blocks certain Mozy functions; I don’t know why the particaulr network adaptor is required.
• As for the data you’re backing up, they’ll be on your system’s hard drives, not the virtual Windows partition, right? They are also linux’s ext3 disk format, not Windows NTFS.
• Set them up as native hard disks inside the Windows guest to back them up. Using VirtualBox’s guest additions to network share your hardrives doesn’t work; Mozy has to access them directly.
• I followed http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=662018 & http://blarts.wordpress.com/2007/12/06/how-to-run-virtualbox-using-a-physical-partition-using-ubuntu-feisty-fawn/, to create .vmdk files that VirtualBox can present as hard drivers to the Windows guest..
• You”ll have to install IFS For Windows for your Windows guest to read Linux’s ext3 format. This is by far the easiest step.
• You may notice that you aren’t meant to mount the drives in Ubuntu & the guest at the same time to prevent write issues. I ignored this, as you are only using the drives for reading under Windows. Unmount the ext3 drives, boot Windows, mount the drives again, use in both; no-one noticed a thing
• Using Mozy, select content in your drives to backup as normal.

And that’s pretty much it. As I said above, though, I got fed up waiting for Mozy to spend hours chugging through my 30Gb of backups, only to ‘forget’ and have to start again. YMMV!