Back-up Question

[Dudelive]

Ok here is the situation, my boss needs a way of backing up his complete system used for business. Operating system is XP Home Edition, there are several programs that can only be installed by the company rep.
What is the better way of backing-up so as to get it back running with out the long wait of the rep finally getting by.

He is using a laptop for the major work due to theft problems. His last system got stole, computer, monitor, keyboard, speakers and even the mouse plus all the cds used for work. Even with security cameras they were not able to get a real good look at them through all the camoflouge they were wearing.

So since that happened that way he uses a laptop.

Thanks
Dudelive

[roadworker]

Acronis TrueImage Server Edition.....

[Dudelive]

That is one that I was thinking about, but can this be used with a boot cd, as in the event the pc will not boot at all?
Also can you restore an image from an external usb hard drive?

These questions are important because that is the exact situation from which I am thinking it will have to be done with. When this happened today without backup there was no way to get it to boot at all.

Thanks
Dudelive

[DopeWeasel]

Here at DeVry University we use Norton Ghost to back up and create drive images of all the faculty and lab computers. It's simple, can be ran accross a network, it's relativly cheap and reliable. We store all of our backups on one of our servers that has a mirrored RAID array. If somthing goes wrong we can wipe and reload a machine (or multiple machines, around 6-8 max because of network throughput) in an hour or less.

I use a newer version of Ghost at home that works great, creates incremental backups for me on a second partition whenever I schedule them. I have 4 partitions on my home pc; C: Windows, D: Programs, E: Temp and Music, and F:Backup(a compressed drive). If my Windows partition gets corrupted I can simply run Ghost and restore it with all my programs on the D drive still intact.

Microsoft is promissing some other form of backup to be announced with the next version of windows (Longhorn) that is supposed to make this process easier, but I don't know all the details.

edit: BTW, to answer your questions, yes... all can be fixed with Ghost. To run a re-image with ghost you boot from either the Ghost CD or a Ghost floppy. You can choose wherever you want for your backup location. I'm honestly not sure if the newest versions of Ghost support external USB drives, but I'm told that they do.