workstation backup

  • Thread starter Thread starter Lber
  • Start date Start date
L

Lber

I'm looking to deploy a pc, which is only a relay to broadcast to a
corporate TV channel within the office.
Nothing will ever change on this pc, no data is stored on it etc.

What i'm looking to find out is that if it is possible to use the XP back up
utility to take a snapshop of the pc, so it can be recovered to the exact
state should it fall over in the future.

I cannot officialy use a product such as ghost or Acronis, as the company do
not own it, nor do they want to buy it.

any ideas???
(apart from telling them to buy Acronis?)
 
Lber said:
I'm looking to deploy a pc, which is only a relay to broadcast to a
corporate TV channel within the office.
Nothing will ever change on this pc, no data is stored on it etc.

What i'm looking to find out is that if it is possible to use the
XP back up utility to take a snapshop of the pc, so it can be
recovered to the exact state should it fall over in the future.

I cannot officialy use a product such as ghost or Acronis, as the
company do not own it, nor do they want to buy it.

any ideas???
(apart from telling them to buy Acronis?)
Click to expand...

Well - other than an imaging software (there are a few free ones if I recall
correctly - google for them) to make an exact copy of the partition/disk...
You can use the Windows XP Backup Utility to get a full system backup
including system state - so you could later reinstall Windows XP and then
restore the system state/etc...

You'd be better off with an imaging software, however...

Symantec/Norton Ghost
http://snipurl.com/13e00

Acronis True Image
http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/

BootIt™ NG
http://terabyteunlimited.com/bootitng.html

You may want other options... Look here...
http://www.softpanorama.org/Unixification/disk_backup.shtml
 
The Windows NTBackup applet can in principle do a full system backup, but in
practice the problem is that you'd need the OS reloaded and running to
restore it. Which, if the OS won't run.. is... a problem.

The other option is to make an exact copy of the files in the OS partition.
(including all hidden/system files of course) You can do this with a
WinPE/BartPE boot CD. Alternatively, temporarily put the disk into another
Windows 2000/XP computer as a secondary/slave, and use XCOPY to transfer the
entire data to a folder on the active disk.

XCOPY <source> <destination> /e /c /h /r /k

is the commandline to transfer all files.

The downside of this approach is the need for the other OS to do the
restore, plus the need to repair the bootsector from the recovery-console
once that's done. Disaster-recovery apporaches should be designed to
minimise the restore requirements, as this wil often have to be done under
pressure. The use of a disk-imager is therefore the best approach.
 
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