Backup and Restore Solution....

[jonmullen]

The situation is I am setting up a small office with 5 new computers and 1 server. The OS's will be Xp. The backup's of the situation on the server will be covered manualy. What I need to do is set up a system that backs up the client systems on a regular basis. This is the pretty simple part. The recovery part is where my needs get a little more complicated. I would like a set up that all the user has to do the restore is to insert a floppy disk, premade of course and it boot up and restore the harddrive from the server. I am looking for opinions on what a good way to acomploish this is. The off is a small not for profit so I'ld like the keep software costs under $100.

Thanks for the help I am sure I will recieve.
Anandtech is the best.

 

[gunrunnerjohn]

How about GHOST 2003? It will do unattended backups in the middle of the night. You may need the corporate version to do backups directly to a server, though you could just backup to another partition and then copy it to the server when Windows reboots, that's what I do. You can restore images from another machine with either version of GHOST by booting both computers with GHOST and transferring across the network. I would think the convenience of the backup is the most important part, since you hopefully won't be doing many restores! 🙂

 

[darkamulets]

i say ghost, since it can run a ghost server in windows to accept backups from other systems that are booted with a special ghost boot disk

 

[HGC]

 

[HGC]

I used DriveImage for years until I discovered SystemGuardian XC 2000 from www.duocor.com. This backs up to a dedicated backup hard drive. It is way way faster and glitch-free for many months. I can't tell you how much grief this product has saved me versus DriveImage, which was so much slower and on occasion refused to restore and gave error messages. In my opinion Duocor is well worth the slightly higher price of about $140.