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What do you all use to image Windows server hard drives? I use Acronis True Image to image my personal computer's C drive to a separate internal drive nightly, always overwriting the previous night's backup with a new full image.
I like the program and would like to implement it on a Windows 2003 Server but their server product is $600-800. Is there anything else you can recommend that does the job for less money? Automated backups and bare metal restores from a boot CD are a must. I haven't used Ghost or Drive Image since Symantec merged them and I had a terrible experience with the resulting product. Has it gotten any better?
Drive Snapshot never had a problem with it......Leo Laporte recommended it on his radio show! German company....server edition costs around $120
I looked at this recently and it appears that being DOS based it can't read NTFS drives when it comes time to restore without a hack. I just heard Steve Gibson recommend another program called Image For Windows that doesn't have that limitation. I'll check it out this weekend.
I looked at this recently and it appears that being DOS based it can't read NTFS drives when it comes time to restore without a hack. I just heard Steve Gibson recommend another program called Image For Windows that doesn't have that limitation. I'll check it out this weekend.
Well, if Steve Gibson recommends it, I'd instinctively trust it until I had a darn good reason to change my mind.
I just installed Image For Windows (Drive Image Backup Software for Windows :: Image for Windows) on a spare computer I use on the workbench. I has a 160GB IDE hard drive with a 20GB XP partition and a 20GB Vista partition. The rest of the disk is a data only partition containing no OS. I use Vista's boot manager to select between the two OS's. I installed the program on the XP partition and imaged both XP and Vista to a single .tbi file on USB hard drive.
The program creates a bootable CD with the DOS based version of itself that can be used for creating, verifying, or restoring images. I used it to restore my backups onto the existing hard drive. Being DOS based, it has no mouse support and a simple tab/arrow/enter navigation system. While sufficient for the advanced user, I can see the typical user being totally lost. It recognized my USB drive (connected to a PCI USB card) and in another test, a SATA drive connected via a PCI SATA card.
Overall, it looks to be a decent program. The UI is pretty sparse but that's fine if it does the job. The download is under 6MB compared to 105MB for True Image 10. I wish the single file/folder restore within Windows was faster but I don't plan on using that much as this would mainly be used in the case of a disaster when the entire drive needs to be restored. It took about 15 minutes to restore 9GB of compressed data from the 2.5" USB drive on P4-1.8.
I do a weekly image of my linux server with mondorescue (without bringing the system down!). For on-demand imaging, I use a linux resuce cd that has partimage on it. NTFS support in partimage is experimental, but if it completes without an error, it should work, according to their website (I don't need to image any Windoze machines anymore).
Location: 1981 Landings Drive, Mountain View, California
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Hi! I'm new around here and I stumbled upon this thread and by the looks of it I could get some helpful tips. Does anybody here have any previous experience with Dell KACE K2000 disk imaging appliances?
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