How to back up 6 computers all at once using an "Imager" program ie Ghost or DIP

[THELAIR]

Hey all.

We are thinking up ideas on how to do mass backups to CD media all at once.

Here's the idea.

Company XYZ wants us to come in once a month and do full backup of hteir system, and then each successive month do a incremental backup of whats been changed. These are simple office desktop PC's P2 400's, 128 MB ram, win98 all connected to a 100mbit LAN.

What htey want is a backup of their entire hard drive, which totals no more than 2 GB of data. That is why i was thinking of Ghost or Drive Image Pro, but they have no CD-R drives and we would have to provide the medium to burn the data.

I thought of a few ideas such as:

External USB CD-R's, they are slow, but the companies PC's all have USB.
Some sort of slide rail kit for normal ATX cases that dont have rail kits, so that i could just slam a high speed cd-r into all of their PC's, burn the data, and then pull out once done.
or
Bring in a SCSI tower desktop with 6 SCSI CD-R's on it, and burn the entire hard drives of each computer over the LAN to each CD-R in the tower connected to their network.

They really want the ability that in the case of a catastrophic crash they can go to their burned image and do a complete reinstall and be back up and running in no time flat. Then update that image every month with whatever new data is added (documents/email etc).

They wont buy CD-R's for all their PC's though, that is up to us. Also when you burn an image to Ghost or DIP, lets say the one guy lost all his email, can we go in and just extract the mail directory that outlook express uses with out having to redo the ENTIRE hard drive from the image? IE: I want to pick and choose what files were compressed and backedup using GHOST or DIP, and not the entire 2gb compressed image contents?

Also is ghost or DIP smart enough to know what has been changed since the last burning? and only update the files that have been changed (archive attribute?)? So that if there was a crash, and they grab their initial full system image, and applied that, they could then take their other "incremental" backedup CD's from the past couple months and apply that to build up their system to the most recent backup? Am i making sense here?

Is there a better way?

They also wanted the ability to encrypt their CD's so that no one can read them. Wasnt sure if ghost or DIP can do that. Was thinking of using PGP.

Tape drive systems, like those by exabyte arnt usefull here, they want to have the CD's in their office once they are burned, and accessible on teh fly, esp for their laptop users.

 

[huggis]

Without adding some hardware to the existing computers (as firewire or scsi cards) it would be painful slow to burn images onto some external USB/paralell burner. Furthermore; i don´t think ghost support that many external burners if you thought of burning direct from ghost. How many computers are there? What would be the total amount of all data (uncompressed)?

My suggestion is to get a laptop with a big, fat harddisc and go with Ghost Multicast server (included in ghost enerprise). That way you would get an easy managed backup solution. Just fire up multicast server on the laptop and have some preconfigured multicast client boot discs that connects via lan to your laptop server and from there start the image making. Take the laptop to your fast burner equipped ´puter and start to burn! Note; you don´t need a speedy laptop for this you´ll just need space.

As for the incremental part of backup: Neither Ghost or, from what i know, DIP can do incremental backups. It´s possible to manually add files to an existing ghost image but thats not an incremental backup in the way that the program could update with any newer files in an automated process... Remember that the main function of this kind of programs is a sector per sector copier. My own experience of adding files to an existing image isn´t all that succesful


That was about adding files: Extreacting files from an image is no problems at all. It can be done from whithin Ghost explorer and has´nt failed to me yet So there would be no problem to extract, for exmple, the outlook folder and replace the existing, corrupt one.

Protecting the image: I don´t remember, and i´m at work right now so i can´t check, but don´t think Ghost can do this for you. Anyway, what would be the point? They plan to have their images on cd at the office and should therefore be no moore less secure than the computers itself?

As you noticed, i´m just mentioning Ghost and that is simply because i have no experience at all from DIP or other similar programs. They are probably moore or less equal but Ghost is the most common program so far and it´s easy to get help from this internet community if you ever need it.

 

[Gunbuster]

A once a month backup is better than nothing, but if the data is worth any $$$ you better backup more often.