Windows BackUp

[Brian Kelsay]

djgoku wrote:
> I have to ghost 25-30 pc's weekly. I have ghost working on a cd which
> helps. But I would like to automate this process, anyone know what
> would be a good way to do this? I could create a bootable partition
> with the needed files to boot from and with network support. Create a
> process that will start at a specified time, and edit the boot.ini to
> boot to the secondary boot partition, and then have a batch file run
> with the correct options and session to connect to when secondary
> partition is booted. And have ghost server auto start when client
> connects. There is a option for ghost that will exit to dos, so some
> how edit the boot.ini back to the normal and then reboot. Wish it as
> easy in linux, but maybe it is and just not seeing it.

So, you want to Ghost from the PC to a central backup server on a 
routine or scheduled or just-when-you-tell-it-to basis?  I assume that 
you don't want to pick each PC up and carry it around for this.

Do you own the full Ghost Enterprise version?  You have to pay a site 
license or per seat.  The full Ghost has the Ghost Console tools.  Ghost 
  7 on up allows you to put a small  hidden ghost partition on each PC 
(20MB), a scheduler console is on the Ghost Server, it sends a magic 
packet and the PC reboots into Ghost and seeks out the session with the 
server.  You have to have the Ghost server already built so that you 
know its hostname before you do the work on the PCs. The hostname for 
the individual PCs gets saved in the ghost partition too. You either 
need a lot of disk space or if they are like kiosk/general use PCs, then 
you need a common image you can load on to them.  Say you have the 
kiosks running for a month and they start to get slow or out of date. 
You load a PC w/ the common image, run all the updates and you know it 
is clean and working properly.  You save that image up and then blast it 
to all the common PCs that night.

For PCs that you just want to back up, you schedule them to run 
staggered throughout the night, leaving time for each to finish.  Make 
sure you have at least a 100Mb connection to all.  This may interfere 
with bandwidth avail to other nightly backups.

This is all custom for each business or location.  You have to evaluate 
a lot of factors before implementing this.  It is doable however.  There 
are several other ways to backup user info without saving an image of 
each machine, login script that points MyDocs to a fileserver that is 
backed up nightly, backup program or script that is scheduled to run 
each night that saves user directories to fileserver, other stuff I 
didn't mention.

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