Ken Teague wrote:
James C. Dastrup wrote:
Just an off-topic tip:
My biannual Windows reinstall takes 5 minutes. Image a working
system up to your network, then image it down when you need to
rebuild. And if you use sysprep, then even any hardware changes
don't affect the image process. Or, put a sysprep'ed image on a DVD
and just image it to any computer - you never need to
see the installation again.
I think the point, here, is that, at some point in time, you do have
to go through the 45 minute flawed installation of Windows before you
can get to get to a point of imaging. Lets throw sysprep in the mix
and you've possibly added a mini-setup to your post-image dump. Tag
on the -pnp argument to sysprep so you can detect any new hardware you
may have thrown in your box since its last image and you've tacked on
another 5-10 minutes to the mini-setup.
Also, a *base* Windows setup (including a copy of i386 in the root of
C:) is roughly 1.5GB of data. What do you get in that 1.5GB? Lets
see, Notepad (such a powerful text editor), Calculator, Character Map,
WordPad (even more powerful than Notepad!), Pinball, Freecell,
MediaPlayer, Internet Explorer, etc... but how much is actually
useful, and how much productivity can be found? Hardly any of it. I
can install Debian in 20 minutes and have a fully functional X Window
System and tons of utilities and productivity tools. We can leave out
C:\i386 and take away about 500MB from that 1.5GB, and that still
leaves us with 1GB of stuff that's mostly CRAP! To get up to speed
after a post-image dump, you'll need to reinstall your apps which
takes most of the time when rebuiling a box. So, tell us... how long
does it take you to get back to where you were after you dump the
image in 5 minutes?
- Ken
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I will say, image or no image in windows, nothing can beat the
simplicity and ease of "tar <options> backup.tgz /" in linux for backup
and the subsequent ease of "tar <other options> backup.tgz /" for
restore. There are plenty of other ways and programs to backup linux,
like unison, and umpteen others, but hey, I don't think there is any
windows program available (for free) that is as simple as just hitting
return after a one line command (which you could make even simpler by
just putting into a script with a really easy name like "backup_system")
to backup or just hitting return after a one line command to restore.
Put it in a cron, cycle the backup filenames, and you have XP's system
restore on steroids, only it doesn't constantly take up resources.
Sorry, I'm just going on about this because I never even bothered
backing up linux boxes until this year and so I'm still in that ooh wow
phase about it.
Raphael
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