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Looking for backup ideas

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by slconsultingsvc

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I have a customer who has contacted me telling me that they want to back up 50 PC's and basically have them rebuildable without reinstalling the operating system. Where this gets sticky is that they have every flavor of Windows OS XP down to NT and 95. Some are networked and some are not. My first thought is to find identical drives for all of these different machines and just do a ghost image of each one and label the drives for each machine. A real pain for sure. What this doesn't cover is the failure of any machine components like a motherboard etc. Anyone have ideas. I have my own but thinking someone on here may be thinking outside of the box??

5 replies

by jdclyde

Another big issue, how many systems have similar hardware? If it was only a few images to maintain, it wouldn't be to bad. If they are all different....... Charge by the hour.

Remind them if the older systems have a hardware failure, they will be hard pressed to get them going on new hardware because of driver support.

by slconsultingsvc

I agree with you that there is really no good answer without replacing hardware. These are all control systems for very large machinery and the manufacturer charges a pretty extraordinary fee to come in and set the software up on the new hardware. They actually want to sell them their own box which I am not gonna let happen. Its like $14,000 a PC and I have already seen it get installed on a E machine there so I know it can be done.
Bottom line you are correct that if the hardware goes bad having a drive backed up isn't really the answer. I am thinking of pitching something to the effect of replacing all of the hardware with identical devices and having all of the them networked and saving images up to a remote server. We could then keep a couple of spare boxes around to handle a hardware outage depending on the criticality of the machine.

by slconsultingsvc

Will these not all have issues putting a 95 image on a new PC if the hardware goes south on the current one? My guess is yes but I have seen Symantec's software install a raid 5 server image onto a IDE drive so maybe its possible?? Anyone have any experience with this?

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