Backing up multiple computers

Here's the situation. At my dad's office there are three computers, two desktops running Windows 98 and a laptop running Windows 2000 Professional. I need to find a way to back up the harddrives of all the computers.

I am planning on buying Norton Systemworks so that I can install and use Norton Ghost on each of the three computers in order to make a backup image of the hard drives. If there is any program better than Ghost for this task, I could look at it, but for now Ghost is what I'm planning to use.

I then have two options for backing up the disk images. The first is an external USB harddrive. The second is setting up a small (and cheap) file server on the network to back up the images too.

The first option is desireable because it is cheap and easy. I found a product which is basically just a shell into which you may insert any harddrive. It connects to the normal 4 pin power connector and IDE ribbon connection on the harddrive. These are adapted to a wall plug and a USB 2.0 port. Though it may be labour intensive to go to each computer and wait for the USB 1 port in the old machines to transfer their entire disk images to the external drive, it is a simple solution.

The second option is the server. It is likely that one of the old Windows 98 machines will be used for this task, and a new Windows XP computer will be bought to replace it. It is possible, however, that the new computer will be bought for this purpose. Either way, this will not be a screaming computer. It'll either be Pentium 3 or Celeron at ~900MHz, or a new, really cheap Pentium Celeron at 2.4GHz. I would only really want to go the way of the server if it would be possible to set up the computers to automatically create a new disk image on a regular basis (daily or weekly), transfer it to the file server, and then delete the old image. I am reasonably sure that this is possible, I just don't know how to do it.

So I really have two questions. First, which method is the better way to go (external drive or networked file server). Second, if I use a file server, how would I set it up such that the disk image is automatically created, transferred, and deleted on a regular basis? If it's not possible to be totally automated, it needs to be really simple. In the office are secretaries and people who are not totally computer literate.

 

agreed with halo.. I actually purchased it by accident.. I wanted their partition software and I didn't pay attention to what I buying. I was so used to hearing and seeing "Acronis True Image" that it was some sort of sub-conscious thing.. any case, I fingered out real soon what I did and decided to give it a shot. I found it MUCH easier to use than ghost and quicker too. Definate thumbs up from me.

 

So Acronis True Image sounds like a winner then. I have never used either program, however, I do have one reservation anout ditching Ghost. I've been told that with Ghost, I can copy images onto another computer and mount them such that they act like a second hard drive. This feature may be useful if a computer goes kaput and we need to access the drive before we get a new box to restore the entire image to. Can Acronis True Image create images capable of doing that?

And thanks for the replies about the program, but I am still wondering about what course of action to take for the hardware side of things.

 

Free Trial:
http://www.acronis.com/download/

 

the trials don't allow you to do anything but look at the program.. they're EXTREMELY limited and hence truly useless in trying to get a good feel for the program.

 

Just an idea. What about installing RAID array on each desktop. The experts here will advise you on this but it will keep another copy of your master drive up-to-date without much human intervention, once set up. Is there a second hard drive bay in the laptop or, as you are thinking, fit an external hard drive. Not an expert as can be seen by my reply. Just asking to stir up experts on this sort of thing. Playing Devils Advocate, I guess. bazza

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RAID 1 makes a mirror of the first drive. It is not meant for backup, rather it is meant to be a fail-safe in case the master drive dies. Any corruption on the first drive is copied to the second drive. Proper backups for stately data should be made on other media.

 

In addition to what Kodo said, and the fact that the laptop couldn't be set up to use RAID due to the fact that it is, well, a laptop, a RAID setup would require the purchase of a RAID card for each desktop and a second harddrive. And that costs money. The idea is to keep things as cheap as possible while developing an effective and easy to maintain solution.

So as to the server, any thoughts? Ideas? Is it possible to have a one-click way to automatically create a backup of a drive and then transfer that over the network to the server? How would that be implemented?

 

Acronis will let you create an image while the OS is up.and you can send the image to a network drive..

 

I didn't suggest RAID for the laptop, only the desktops. I realise the limitations of laptops having owned them since the Tandy 4P days (that was a hell of a paperweight) . I asked if you could fit a removable second hard drive to your laptop. I have 2 hard drive bays on my laptop and 3 hard drives. a permanent 30 gig and 2 removable 10 giggers. I back up to one of the 10 gigs, as well as backup to a separate partition on the 30 gig. 2 different drives, 2 different backup protocols, as the Irish say, to be sure, to be sure. Bazza

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