Backup Methods.

[pelligrini]

I'm looking for an easy method to do some backups at our office, and possibly at home too.

At work, I've got a large tape drive that I use to back up my server, and other important data. I'm using a Veritas porgram and it suits my needs very nicely. I will also do a CD backup on occaision and take them home with me. I've tested restoring the data, and it works fine.

My main question is that id like to find a good method to backup an entire machine, and be able to restore a drive image. If the drive on my personal workstation failed, I'd be spending way too much time re-installing and configuring the darn thing. Does anyone have any good methods?

[X-Calibur]

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ What he says, I'm interested too...

Plz?

[Stilgar]

What? You don't like doing fresh installs? Everything nice and squeeky clean. :D
On the back up deal. I've used the "recovery" one that comes with my cdr. But have never needed it. (Cross-fingers) Just wondering anybody ever use the HP one?

[Miles]

Maybe a Raid 1 or 0+1 array would work for you. More info here (www.raid.com/04_01_00.html)

[pelligrini]

Squeaky clean is nice, but getting Autocad and all my other programs back to the way I like it is not something I enjoy doing. That's probably why my main machine at home is a 3 1/2 year old install of 98se. The thing has been on three different mobos and three different chipsets.

Doing a CD backup of over 5gig of worth of program files is not what I'd rather do. I played with one backup program, Drive Image Pro, I think it was. Restoring an image across a LAN was not an easy task. I don't remember getting it to work properly either.

[verT]

You could always go the expensive route and get a second hardrive and ghost it periodically and not plug it in until you need it. A removable HD chassis is good for this

[pelligrini]

That's a solution, but not very practical in this situation.

The reason that I use my own fileserver, Quad P-Pro, at the office is that it replaced the P-166 POS that was the last one. It was a workstation before that. :sad:

(It's also nice to have the office power a few of my genome machines :D )

[EOC_Jason]

Norton Ghost! It makes an image of anything and you can restore it quite easily right back to how the system was when you backed it up.

[MikeTimbers]

You can also Ghost across a network into 650MB chunks then copy to CD. Ghost talks you through reating boot floppies for network conectivity.

[Yo_Mama]

Yah, ghost is good. I haven't used the backup over a network part yet, but I always back up in 650mb chunks and have two sets on CD at all times.

(as I'm writing this I'm continually pushing the shift key to hear the squeak stickykeys makes under WinXP. how bored is that?)

[zhotfire]

IIRC, Drive Image has an option to update and replace files within an image, thou i've never used it... :rolleyes: I haven't used the network option either as i've always had another drive/partition to create the image on in said machine.

[Bruce]

I've used DriveImage too, but I think it would be a bit of a problem to restore it to a system that I had to boot from floppy. Better go check if I have a DriveImage bootable floppy . . . .

Our office uses Ghost and is very happy with it. I saved a few $$ on DI.