Jeff Richards wrote: > 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. ? >
nope, this isn't at uchicago, it's office PCs at a manufacturing company. i'm more interested in full restores, e.g. recover from a hard drive failure, instead of recovering files that someone accidentally deleted. > 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. > i would be interested to hear how this goes. i can provide some notes of what i try later this coming week. > 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. > i appreciate all the suggestions everyone provided and gave g4u a whirl today. g4u looks promising but a level 0 dump takes a long time and requires user intervention. i will try the ntbackup to a samba share this coming week and see how well it works. seems like microsloth is keen on locking you in to using another sloth utility to backup their drives so the ntbackup route seems to that of least resistance. i have used acronis trueimage to good effect, although i'm looking to do this on the cheap and with existing equipment if possible. cheers, jake > Hope this helped. > > Good luck.
