Discussion on:

DIY: Get reliable disaster recovery for free

S/he's already doing the IT as an extra, over-and-above part of his/her line of business job; now s/he has to make sure to be at the office after everyone else has gone home, in order to take the server(s) down and back them up, wait for the backup to complete, and reboot again!? Hmm, afraid this is going to have little appeal in any of my sites

I don't get it.

If you're focusing on the backup operation, which clearly, Jack is not, then no, larger shops with frequent backups would obviously not want to do it that way.

This appears to be a nice solution for a small office or home office, if you can then save that data off site. I wouldn't want to use it in an enterprise setting though. I can think of a great solution by a company (I am not going to spam you guys.) that is a life saver. And for the cost of less than $500.00 there is not reason to not use it. I only wish they had a windows product.

I use Clonezilla for a small office, 3 times a year and upon release of new computers to users. I'm interested in Jack's suggestion as an alternative. It sounds similar to and prettier than Clonezilla.
I agree that it's not a viable possibility for medium or large businesses.

@adrin, endorsement based on experience is sharing your knowledge among peers, unless you are marketing the product. Frankly, it's why I frequent this site. Please be more specific. There are many reasonable solutions under $500. Which one is the indispensable one you speak of?

Aside, why the enterprise-oriented comments on Jack's DIY blog? You're not the intended audience, even if you're able to read it. Recognize the intent, and that sometimes it's just not about you (DB). I value his insights, as applicable.

Cloning a HD is the easy part and is accomplished by the backup-program of your choice. Restoring to a new HD is also easy, using bootable Rescue CD (usually Linux). But a glaring omission from most backup strategies is when the MB goes up in smoke (yes they do!) and you have to restore to a completely new PC with different hardware (CPU, Chipset, etc.) . Just restoring a cloned image will NOT work. You need a backup program that can handle the new hardware. One such option (certainly are others) is Acronis Backup & Restore 10; although capable of Enterprise centrally managed operation, it works quite well stand-alone on a PC. The optional "Univeral Restore" allows you to put the required drivers on the new PC as well as the OS restore. You can be back up and running in a few hours after that capacitor fails on the MB.

The reason this is important is that there may be a way to create a backup without booting to the LiveCD. I agree that scheduling downtime for the creation of a backup is unreasonable. The alternatives I can think of are:

1. Find a way of making a compatible backup file by other means from within other OS environments.

2. Run the LiveCD in a VirtualBox and create the backup without shutting down.

I support our small office remotely and can't shutdown the servers to do my backups. So I've recently begun using ODIN (Open Disk Imager for Windows). It doesn't cover my linux backups (but they are all virtual machines anyway) but it does allow me to hot backup my windows servers using a script. It's even portable (run from a usb stick with no install) so for my recovery I use a WinPe usb stick I've created so I can walk anyone at the office through how to recover when necessary.

I stumbles on this awhile back: http://www.fogproject.org/ i was able to get it installed and backing up several machines. its all open source and linux based. very easy to use and setup.

I have been looking for a good live cd to do recovery and other functions for a while, and have found it. Thanks for the great article! I just used this utility a few days ago to test a cheap deployment structure for new PC's and this worked great. I have never seen an easier distro to use to image a pc across a network. If I can't afford the industrial grade acronis, I can make due with redo backup at work.

I can't figure out what format to specify to back up to a Windows-based network share. Redo works okay to a USB drive, but I'd like to back directly up to a server instead. I've tried multiple varations of the FQDN, server\share, IP\share, credentials, no credentials, domain, no domain, etc. I can ping the desired server by name and IP address. What few other Linux skills I had have atrophied to the point where I don't remember much else in the way of troubleshooting the connection.