Just wondered what peoples thoughts are for this

About a 18 months ago I arrived in New Zealand - got a job and inherited
this network of about 30 desktop PC's all running Xphome!!! and 2 servers
running slackware in a business environment.

Because there were no backups of any kind my first panic reaction was to
implement a backup system where all the desktop machines HDD's were in
removable caddies and I then backed up (GHOST'd)) all the HDD's on a monthly
basis to a central PC with a sizeable HDD for the purpose (infact to make
the system even faster I used 4 PC's to do the job. On average a 4-5hr job
with all the running around collecting hdd's - rebooting etc.

I am slightly paranoid about backups but I am also admittedly lazy (for
routine tasks) and when staff members PC's die I like to be able to get them
back up and running in under half an hour... Makes me look good - makes them
happy. And in the last 18months this has worked well as HDD's have died on a
semi regular basis as I expect them to. This is also good as prior to my
arrival the old IT guys method was just to rebuild from scratch, which would
put their machine out of action for ages and lose all the data from that PC
which understanably upset people.

Now.... A thought occurred to me - these are all business machines and they
have between 40 and 80 Gb hdd's. Most of them have between 4-8gb of usage. A
couple of members of staff have over 20Gb but that's not the norm.

What I thought was that I could partition these HDD's so there is a 10-20gb
hidden partition.
Then use a script/software where one machine would back up its data to
anothers hidden partition.
Lastly on a weekend - (when the network is not being used ) I can then Setup
a cron/batch to move all the data back to a centralised storage

Any thoughts on this .... I already use a windows version of cron and some
local batch files to run server based batch/scripts on these machines rather
than writing scripts for each individual  machine. They also backup certain
data (that isnt already on the server) nightly to the server. And (paranoia
once again) the server backs up to tape mission critical data and also to my
desktop machine its then rar's it up and weekly my pc dumps it to dvd. All I
need to do is load the tapes nightly and load the dvd on a Friday night (see
lazy and paranoid). - sorry I digressed.

My biggest foreseeable problems are that I would prefer to image the HDD's
as this is the quickest method of rebuilding them. The other is that many of
these systems are left on with applications left open , including Outlook /
Thunderbird etc and of course there will be a significant amount of locked
windows files and the Registry to consider. I realise that there is a fairly
hefty program for linux/windows called Bacula - it looks fairly complex to
implement (although I have only take a momentary look at it) but apparently
it will backup live windows environments. Has anyone had any luck with this
? 

Your considered thoughts and opinions are greatly valued

I hope that the above made some semblance of sense

Cheers

Chris 

Waitakere, Auckland NZ

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