Backing Up Drive Images

[Carlosinfl]

I have a few users on the LAN that leave and give up their PC however they ask I don't re-image their drives and to save them in case they come back.

I can't afford to store away fully operational SATA drives when the fact is I will never really see many of these guys again and I have new users who need their drives. Is there a solution you guys can recommend for either taking a snapshot image of the drive and uploading this to the LAN or something of that nature? I don't want to include the available / unwritten disk space in the image, just the data from their drives if that makes any sense. I would like to keep these images as small as they can possible be.

Thanks for any suggestions!

 

[Ezekial]

boot disk + ghost

it will take a snapshot, put it into a file, and you can burn it off to a DVD or 2

with teh boot disk, have it connect to the network, and map a shared drive
delete all temporary files and crap from the machine to safe space on the image (and time)
run the ghost
then go fix machine up for next person

 

[RavenD]

Norton Ghost or Arconis Trueimage. I've only used Ghost, but have heard that TrueImage is superior.

 

[Bones]

If you have Linux experience, I recommend ntfsclone.

I use the ntfsclone utility for imaging Windows ntfs partitions. It is open source. It only copies the active blocks of the ntfs filesystem, not all of the unused space. Boot a Linux LiveCD like Knoppix on the client machine, use ntfsclone, and pipe the output over the network to your storage server via ssh or netcat. The LiveCD will be able to use Samba for connecting to a Windows share, if your storage box runs Windows. The output can be filtered through gzip for compression.

I use this method for imaging the Windows partition on my games machine. Works great. Gzip knocks about 15% off of the file size, and it's fast. If storage space is a problem, bzip2 can be used for much better compression by trading off speed.

Another nice thing about the ntfsclone images is that they are loop mountable on a Linux machine, which allows normal file access to the contained ntfs filesystem. If a customer comes back looking for something specific, it should be easy to pull the data from the image.