IT Employment

use ghost. I assume that these 40 pcs are on a network even though you didnt mention. If they are you can Run ghost from one machine as multicast server and then boot each pc with a ghost disk which will allow you to connect to the ghost server and capture the image of the pc. I then would burn the image on cd and lable it with the users/computer name. If anything goes wrong in the future you can at least get them back to the point of when you made the ghost.

Rad

I have 'Tons' of info on m y Pc right now because I am doing personal research projects;
So
I have been seriously looking into how I can store save protect all my infoermation & work....
The safest way seems to me to be
Install a rewrite drive in each computer
Store each segment or type of info on a disc,
so
the info work etc remains on the Pc but youy also have a very safe copy.

In your case I would
1.) Call a meeting with all computer people
2.) Ask for their help collaboration Help
3.) Install a rewrite drive into each persons PC in your company
4.) Ask each person to be resposible for their own information.
5.) Ask them to back up to removable disc each day.
6.) Ask for copies end of each week so you can review info / work / project... or ??

This way you can
Ease your own work Load
& make everyone a partner making everyone co-operate with each other more & ensuring less chance of Loss.
It may be that some people will need help to do this.
Make a Mini Poster & attach it to each persons PC or Wall
or
Programme into each persons PC
a reminder to do this before closing down
or
install programming into each persons PC
for all work to be automatically saved to rewrite disc
& also to a main frame PC
or
Mainframe PC discs that can be removed end of each day...
Good Luck
I hope this Helps
BJewel

Reading your question I had to ask myself these questions;

What is the goal that you are ulimately trying to achieve?

And what is the present setup, ie where is the data stored?

From what I can gather, you are trying to backup data from individual machines on a regular basis.

Next I have to ask myself, Why is all data not stored in a central location?

The next questions is, have you been tasked with having an restore image of each machine in the case of hardware failure. And if so, is each machine exactly the same? These are important considerations for using image based backups.

Image based backups serve a different purpose then data based backups.

For data based backups: The ultimate solutions would be to attach that 60gig drive (hopefully it is an array and not just a single drive),
Get all data off of all individual machines and have it stored *permamently* on the file server (60 giger). Then you back up the 60 gig drive to tape on a regular basis.
(For user files I use the weekly full daily incremntal method; For production mission critical, Daily Full)

A note on File servers; They should generally be in some sort of a scsi based hardware array in a RAID5 config. This can be done using one generic box with NTserver on it (4 or 2k), buying a hardware raid scsi controller, and a minimum of 3 scsi drives.

To set up raid5 on the drives, you would use the raid scsi card instead of the OS. Hardware raid is always better then software raid.
A note on images, backing up 40 2 gig full of data drives as images will = 80 gigs. Images are not compressed as one might beleive. They just are packaged in a way that you can restore the drive back to the state it was in when you imaged it.

go for magic partiton i supose man
sumit