Yes. Go virtual where possible. We use Vmware Esxi 6.5 which is free and has a Web admin interface. With ghettoVCB which is free we do backups while machines are running to a NAS. If the vmware machine dies we could start up the virtual machines from a second vmware server right from the NAS. Makes me sleep better than with HW which could fail and it may last a day until restored. There are old win2003 virtual servers which you don't want to have on their original Hardware...
-------- Ursprüngliche Nachricht -------- Von: Faisal Imtiaz <[email protected]> Datum: 22.12.17 16:37 (GMT+01:00) An: [email protected] Betreff: Re: [AFMUG] Computer Image backup/restore FYI... Just because Norton Ghost is being discoed, it does not mean that your copy will stop working. (At the end of the day, these are 'disc duplicators' / bit copiers) There are a number of Open Source alternatives available... e.g Clonezilla , Partimage, FOG Projects etc etc etc. Having said that.. My personal suggestion for you would be to re-think running stand alone machines and consider virtualization...... It may be a bit of a learning curve in the beginning, but moving forward in the future, it is going to save you a lot of time and grief. (since VM's are just another File..doing backup other maint. events are easy as pie ! ) Regards. Faisal Imtiaz Snappy Internet & Telecom http://www.snappytelecom.net Tel: 305 663 5518 x 232 Help-desk: (305)663-5518 Option 2 or Email: [email protected] From: "Forrest Christian (List Account)" <[email protected]> To: "af" <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, December 21, 2017 11:06:30 PM Subject: [AFMUG] Computer Image backup/restore Normally backups around here are file-based, I.E. I want to make sure I don't lose data. I have a couple of computers now which I really would hate to have to rebuild due to hardware failure. These are generally computers which run a machine, such as the automatic test system and the pick and place machine. These machines area all typically single-drive (non-mirrored) mostly off the shelf hardware running various versions of windows. I'd like to take a full image, and have at least a reasonable chance of putting it back on similar hardware (probably same motherboard, maybe different storage medium) and it just work. It used to be that the tool for this was Norton Ghost. But that's been discontinued (and I understand it was going downhill before that). So I'm looking for whatever the current modern version is. I know there's a few tools out there which do this (Macrium, Acronis, etc). But the reviews are all littered with failures. Unfortunately it's hard to tell how much of this is lack of clue and how much of this is broken software. I'm wondering if anyone has experience with using these modern equivalents? Preferably something which runs on a range of Windows OS'es, and can dump the image onto NAS. -- Forrest Christian CEO, PacketFlux Technologies, Inc. Tel: 406-449-3345 | Address: 3577 Countryside Road, Helena, MT [email protected] | http://www.packetflux.com
