Sorry - in case I didn't make it very clear.... I was wondering what strategy people take On the backup front over multiple OS's / machines. And if anyone actually implements a particular one successfully as after all its only when You come to restore the data do you find its success or failure. I personally have found the ghosting monthly to be very effective and simple but ostensibly time consuming and at the moment I am on an automation drive !!! Cheers Chris -----Original Message----- From: piclist-bounces@mit.edu [mailto:piclist-bounces@mit.edu] On Behalf Of gavin-egan.com Sent: Thursday, June 12, 2008 7:18 PM To: 'Microcontroller discussion list - Public.' Subject: [OT] Alternative PC Backup Strategy 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 -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist