Vista Backups for Departments

[Rick Watson]

I was looking at moving the users I support to Vista backup. We currently
use a 3rd party product to tape, but as data keeps getting larger, writing
to tape becomes more and more ineffecient. Only one computer at a time can
write to the tape system we have.

So I started moving computers to Vista for file backup. The lack of control
over files was a little annoying, but it works well enough for what I need.
We backup to NAS, so all the computers can backup simultaneously (if they
need to). But then in further reading, I hit a major stumbling block. It is
how full backups are done after the first.

As everyone knows, making the end user an Admin is just a disaster waiting
to happen. So none of our users are Administrators. But one must be an
Administrator to run backup. OK, I can understand why from a security
perspective, in order to backup files I should have rights to them. So I
set up the first backups and they run under an Administrator context.

However if what I am reading is correct, sometime in 30-90 days, my users
are going to receive a message that they need to do another full backup.
The users are not administrators, so unless I'm mistaken, they cannot do
that. The idea of setting up a time that I can login to use their computer
to backup their machine every month is ridiculous at best.

So, do the future full backups run under the security context I setup? Or
are my fears confirmed, the user is going to have to go in and tell it to do
a full backup, which will fail. Which means I will have to personally run
full backups on 45 computers about once a month?

I hope I'm wrong, but if I am not, I don't see how the backup system is at
all usable for corporate clients.

Thanks in advance for any explanations or ideas,

Rick

 

[gls858]

I was looking at moving the users I support to Vista backup. We
currently use a 3rd party product to tape, but as data keeps getting
larger, writing to tape becomes more and more ineffecient. Only one
computer at a time can write to the tape system we have.

So I started moving computers to Vista for file backup. The lack of
control over files was a little annoying, but it works well enough for
what I need. We backup to NAS, so all the computers can backup
simultaneously (if they need to). But then in further reading, I hit a
major stumbling block. It is how full backups are done after the first.

As everyone knows, making the end user an Admin is just a disaster
waiting to happen. So none of our users are Administrators. But one
must be an Administrator to run backup. OK, I can understand why from a
security perspective, in order to backup files I should have rights to
them. So I set up the first backups and they run under an Administrator
context.

However if what I am reading is correct, sometime in 30-90 days, my
users are going to receive a message that they need to do another full
backup. The users are not administrators, so unless I'm mistaken, they
cannot do that. The idea of setting up a time that I can login to use
their computer to backup their machine every month is ridiculous at best.

So, do the future full backups run under the security context I setup?
Or are my fears confirmed, the user is going to have to go in and tell
it to do a full backup, which will fail. Which means I will have to
personally run full backups on 45 computers about once a month?

I hope I'm wrong, but if I am not, I don't see how the backup system is
at all usable for corporate clients.

Thanks in advance for any explanations or ideas,

Rick

Take a look at this backup program

http://www.backup-for-workgroups.com/index.html

We use it here where I work and I'm quite satisfied with it.

gls858