Home / server / Questions / 41046
Accepted
Devnull
Asked: 2009-07-16 05:43:11 +0800 CST

BKF Utilies

  • 772

anyone know of a tool to inspect and compare BKF files? or compare BKF contents with whats live on the filesystem?

lets say i have a known-good BKF, and all it contains are the files i want to compare. i have another BKF that is known-bad. how could i tell the differences between them (files, permissions, contents, etc)?

one solution would be to restore to different locations and look at them that way, but being able to compare the two BKFs would be much cleaner.

backup

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Have a look at this Server Fault answer for starts.

    The Java-based JMTF project (MTF = Microsoft Tape Format-- the "real" format of BKF files) might give you the tools you need to pull apart a BKF file and do a compare to a live filesystem. In theory, somebody could code up a tool to do what you're asking for.

    Personally, I'd just restore the BKF to some spare space somewhere and use a tool like WinMerge to compare the BKF data and live filesystem. Space to do a temporary restore is cheap, whereas writing code is not. It's not "clean", perhaps, but it's cheap and you can get started now.

    • 2

  2. There are two other open source utilities for reading NTBackup files. The first, which was developed for unix, but could probably be made to compile on windows is MTF. The second is a tool called msbackup.

    Both leave you in the same situation of requiring you to extract the backup archive and then comparing the results via a third party tool.

    • 1