Are you possibly wanting partial restores as well as complete? Are you implementing this in the university environment with "lab" PCs, or is this more for the faculty, etc. ?
I've used Bacula to backup my home PCs. For a while Bacula has support VSS (shadow copy), so that is a major improvement. I use ntbackup to get a system state in a cmd script and have that as a "before" job in my job definition. Supposedly I should be able to use my Windows restore CD to restore a base OS, then restore the contents of my Bacula backups and the system state. Theoretically (I say that because I discussed this with Windows admins at my last job) the system should be restored. They were not 100% confident with the system state restore from Microsoft. I actually plan on verifying my restore procedure on one of my PCs using a spare drive. It may be at least a week before I go through my "disaster recovery" test, but I will let you know the results if it will help. Apart from the Bacula procedure I have used FreeDOS with savepart to backup/restore systems. Very good to use as another method for full system recovery. Of course with Linux there are other imaging applications as well. One last thing might be to automate the backups of the PCs to a share (Samba, or W2K/W2K3, etc.) using ntbackup to get the drive and system state information. Again you will have to use a Windows install CD to get a base system (if they are all the same hardware I would definitely clone one with latest patches and label the image so you know what patch-level/etc. you are at) and then restore the system state and data. Hope this helped. Good luck. Jacob Yocom-Piatt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: i've seen a number of solutions for backing up windows hosts to an openbsd backup server. there are ~50 windows hosts to backup with an average of ~10 GB of stuff on each machine. for my purposes a key feature of such a solution is that it makes FULL backups of the windows hosts that can be used to replace faulty hard drives with working bootable replacement drives. the solutions i've seen offered on openbsd lists and elsewhere are - amanda w/ cygwin - rsync w/ cygwin - bacula - backuppc - boxbackup if anyone has experience with these programs and can vouch for their ease of use in the aforementioned context, i would like to hear about it. do let me know if i've missed any good ones that are not already listed. i am to understand that backuppc cannot backup locked windows files nor can you generate full bootable restores, so it's out of the running pretty much off the bat. figured i'd mention it anyways... cheers, jake Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
