Software To Image Office Computers

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rosco

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I am looking at setting up a system where the office computers are imaged so that we can get them back up and running quickly in case of a hard drive crash etc.

They currently don't have a server, so I was planning on putting in a NAS with a bunch of storage space.

What software would you guys recommend for this? Just use the Windows 7 backup or something like Acronis?

I thought about just creating an initial image and then only backing up their data from then on. However, I think that it would be worth it to them to be able to have a image ready to recover them back to EXACTLY the way their computer was before the hard drive crashed etc.

Thanks.
 
Acronis can work for the main image. Other options can be found by searching this forum.

Remap their MyDocs folder to a file server, and tell them to store all their important stuff in MyDocs.
 
We use Ghost. Straightforward and easy. When you do it from a Ghost server you can image many PCs at once. Very handy.
 
Although for what you're talking about - restoring vs deploying - you may want to look at Windows Server 2012 Essentials.

Of course, you can install Ghost Server on Server 2012 and do both.
 
I'm surprised to see a couple ghost recommendations. I thought their day had come and gone.

Sounds like you guys are thinking a more traditional server either way as opposed to just getting a NAS to dump the files to though.
 
rosco said:
I'm surprised to see a couple ghost recommendations. I thought their day had come and gone.

Sounds like you guys are thinking a more traditional server either way as opposed to just getting a NAS to dump the files to though.
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Yeah, wouldn't Windows 7 backup from Win 7 PRO be sufficient for your needs? I'm about to do the exact same thing.
 
I use Ghost almost every day. It just works. I imaged and deployed about 150 laptops in one day when doing a Sandy recovery for my employer using Ghost Server running on an old laptop and a gigabit switch.

I recommended Windows Server Eseentials because it can do centralized automatic scheduled backups of all your PCs. So much easier to manage than individual client backups. You can toss Ghost Server on the same machine and boot to Ghost Client using a CD or network boot on the client machines and pull images right from the server over ethernet. It's great.

When we had nFrastructure come in and do massive laptop deployments, they did the same thing - using Ghost Server to deploy images over ethernet.
 
rosco said:
I'm surprised to see a couple ghost recommendations. I thought their day had come and gone.

Sounds like you guys are thinking a more traditional server either way as opposed to just getting a NAS to dump the files to though.
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the newer versions of ghost CAN NOT actually image an entire drive.

Now you need to tell it to backup a partition, let it finish, then tell it to backup the 2nd partition, so on and so forth until you have copied/imaged all the partitions.

Isn't it ironic that the brand that's synonymous with drive cloning actually can no longer clone an entire drive?
 
If you have Windows Server 2008 or newer, Windows Deployment Services. It's included in Windows Server.
 
Well, now I'm looking at two separate locations. One doesn't have a Windows server yet but it might be a good fit.

The other is too small to really need a server. For them, I'm still thinking NAS.

So, ghost can no longer capture an image? That doesn't make sense. Are the older versions that can still available? I definitely want to be able to quickly restore an image over the network from the NAS.

The other reason I'm thinking of imaging/backup software as opposed to Windows built in backup is I'm worried about managing the number of files stored and the space they will eat up over time. I'm hoping to do something like allocate a maximum amount of storage each machine can take up and have the backup software work within that.

The initial image then use backup software solution sounds pretty good. I guess I'm just worried that the end user might install software that they need or change settings etc and that wouldn't be part of the data backup and wouldn't be part of the initial image.
 
If you only plan on pulling down 1 or 2 images at a time over the network it will be OK, but if you plan on doing more I wouldn't get to excited about network imaging unless your going to be multicasting (through WDS) or something.

BTW, Microsoft has free network imaging tools in the Windows 7 deployment kit. You basically create a CD automatically, which you boot to, and it connects to pull down the image.

I like using Active@ Disk Image (which I use to create a boot disc). It functions a lot like old-school Ghost, but supports modern OSes. You can do disk-to-disk, which can clone a 15 GB drive in about 7 minutes. You can also burn images to DVD to restore from. The only thing I don't like is that the boot disc is not put on to the DVD's you burn, which means you boot from a different DVD/USB drive than what contains the image.
 
I have use acronis 9, 10, and 11
No problems with 11, other then its a little slower on older machines.
Just setup a NAS, for the images, active directory handles the rest for us in terms of data.
 
I think I'm going to go with Acronis backing up to a NAS device. Hopefully it will work smoothly.

For as long as products like Acronis have been around you would think they would have things ironed out and down to a science by now. I hope that's the case.
 
rosco said:
I think I'm going to go with Acronis backing up to a NAS device. Hopefully it will work smoothly.

For as long as products like Acronis have been around you would think they would have things ironed out and down to a science by now. I hope that's the case.
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Don't forget, unless something has changed since I did this, you can't just image one machine an deploy it to others. This causes issues with SIDS.

In the day we used Sysprep to resolve this.

Have not built images in several years now, so some of this am have changed.
 
PXE server with premade images sypreped for deployment.

Folder redirections for peoples files with roaming profiles

done deal! nothing is on their sysmtem it could go up in smoke, they can log into any other computer and be up and working in minutes
 
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