Imaging System-

[Atown]

Hey All,

At my work we currently have been using the Windows PE imaging method for all of our rigs, but we have been having a rough time with the windows 7 drivers for our newer units, even with updated PE disks. We want to get away from PE for other reasons too but wasnt sure what other options were out there.

I know Norton Ghost exists but kinda want to stay away from norton..... personal bias

and we tried G4L but it failed about 8 times and corrupted our linux installs.

Most of our computers are running windows professional, with some laptops on windows 7 and a few units here n there with linux.

The more options the better for controlling the images and what is backed up and how its handled, e.g. via the network or local disk.

Thanks in advance for the help.

 

[Lloren]

Ghost is awesome. If it makes you feel any better, Norton bought this program a long time ago. It was put together by a group out of Butte, Montana (Montana pride!).

Anyways, Norton hasn't mucked with it and it still works great.

 

[Kidan]

we use Symantec BESR and typically what we direct our customers too as well.

This can do scheduled images of one or more drives, placing those images on an directly connected or network drive.

 

[Atown]

im actually liking the BERS system alot. quick question: since im using the trial im not sure, but will it basically act as a full imaging of the hard drive, only partition/installs, or back up files?

 

[Kidan]

the answer is: yes. BESR performs backups to disk, as well as partition or drive images.

Typically when we deploy it, we use it to perform nightly backups to tape of file/db servers and then do weekly/monthly quarterly images of all boxes.

We even have one client that has rolled it out to every computer on the network to perform weekly images of each workstation.

 

[Hescominsoon]

if you have a windows server backend there's network imaging built into the system..it works fairly well to boot.

 

[Atown]

if you have a windows server backend there's network imaging built into the system..it works fairly well to boot.

currently we have a windows 2003 server and use the WIN PE system for imaging. i cant quite get the deployment stuff working and unsure if its the software on the machine, the computer labs, my own incompetence or AD giving me crap about privileges. If i remember right, we dont have the right version of win2003 server to make it work. <rant> and i was kind of mad at my boss recently too because he missed the deadlines to request microsoft grant software that WSU gets every year so we could have server 2008, even though i reminded him every few weeks about it >.> </rant>