Setting up backup procdure

[Kane17]

We have 5, and soon to be more, PC's on our company network.


The object is, we want to be able to backup these machines weekly and put the backup USB harddrives in our safe at night.



My first Idea was to use a program called "self image" (which I think copies the image of the selected partition) and just re-image the individual computers if they went down...


To do this I just was going to use WinPE or BartPE so I could write to the primary drives while I ran "Self Image" but I cannot get them to see our USB hard drive which the backup images would be stored.


So, should I abandon this method of backup?

What would you do for a business that is growing? Procedure needs to be practical for 5-20 machines.


Our other option was going to just copy each hard drive from each machine to its own backup USB Hard Drive but since you cannot copy certain active files this has become a bit of a hassle.

I can work around that problem slightly BUT I am leaving this company soon and one of my tasks before I leave is to set in place a backup procedure that I can write down step by step.

 

[Bones]

Is there a need for images of each individual machine? If not, just designate one of the boxes as the "file server", and have everybody put their files on it. That way you'll only have one box to back up.

 

[Kane17]

hmmm

We DO have our major ultra-important files,web site backups, etc in 1 designated net shared folder, but unfortunatly our company has need to hang on to all word/publisher documents, all email data, and basicly everything ever worked on...ever

Since Many files are already stored throughout the various hard drives, the consolidation project to place all important files onto the file server would probably be exhaustive, especially since I'd have to kick people off of their machines in order to do it, and that really is not an option for tasks that would take longer than 10 minutes


Just to throw another wrench into the equation, my boss and his wife use their machines here to have some of their personal files on like their vacation pictures, recorded cds and stuff like that. And yes, they want them backed up too.


So, the short answer is, most likely yes they do.





Also, Since down-time on any of our PC's can really hurt us I was hoping to be able to re-burn a hard drive image in case of minor failures such as dead hard drives or inability to boot from data corruption or something. That way we could just keep going as if nothing happened. And this method would obviously only work if we took images of each computer

But in case of more major disasters such as fire we want the backups located elsewhere so thats why were going to do USB HD backups..

 

[unhappy_mage]

You should be able to use DriveImage XML to schedule invisible whole-machine backups to a network drive while the machine is up and running (although it'll probably be a little laggy for the user). Then it can be restored with a BartPE disk which pulls the image over the network.

 

[Kane17]

Ah, that sounds simple enough.

Just as a test, I was going to try sharing our current backup drive on the network and opening the image in bartPE, however I couldn't access the shared folders on the network for some reason...I could SEE every machine in the workgroup but no shared folders were listed.


Is there something I should know about networking with BartPE?

 

[unhappy_mage]

Did it ask you to log on to the machines? Sometimes Windows will let you log in with a blank username and password, but not let you get to any shares. What happens if you explicitly browse to a share you know exists?

 

[Kane17]

no it did not ask me to log in to the machines.

Also, I figured I could try doing the reverse, and copy onto the shared folder on the BartPE loaded system, but it DOES ask me to log in when going from another PC to BartPE...I figured the user name would be SYSTEM but what about a password?? I googled it but cannot find what the password to log into bartPE's shared folder.

 

[Skud]

Symantec Ghost Corporate should do what you want..

You push out/install the ghost agent on each machine.. Then, from your designated "server" PC you can automatically pull an image of the machine to your PC. Then, just dump that to your USB drive..

I'm pretty sure you can schedule this, so just let it do it's thing overnight and when you come in in the morning, you will have a USB drive with images of each PC from last night...

Riley