> My biggest concern is a backup strategy. Currently the workstations back up > to a single location. I'm concerned how this will be affected with VPC.
Some ideas in decreasing order of importance: 0) The VPC is built from generic OS and DevStudio components, so you can save that built image once to backup and be done with that. It is important to expose as little business important files on the VPC. 1) You should be checking all source files into your version control system every night (or most nights) anyway, so the VPC shouldn't contain much that isn't under source control (and thus backed up from there). 2) If you leave the VPCs running (like I do), you can back them up just like any other network PC. I would suggest backing up all the non-base image directories only (Documents and Settings and C:\Dev or whatever). Also, leaving the VPC up will let you RDP into it from home, which ROCKS. 3) You can always use RoboCopy (or simply XCOPY) to mirror all the important directories to the host PC (or somewhere on the network) from whence the backup can ensue. :) 4) You can develop sources on a network share exposed by the host for each VPC to use. The shared-directories on the host PC can then be backed up like normal. 5) Using VMWare or VirtualPC, you can use differencing images to store the changes only against the base image. That's a much smaller backup, but still big. You can dispose of those backups quite quickly. Hope these help... treat your VPC as if it were a real PC. If you worry about losing the base image, back it up (once or twice). I usually ZIP my base images and store them on a file-server, but burn one DVD to keep handy in my laptop bag. -- "Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite." –John Kenneth Gailbraith Marc C. Brooks mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://musingmarc.blogspot.com
