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On Mon, 2004-07-19 at 13:46, Mccormack, Andrew wrote: > I am thinking of just doing a file backup instead of system backup > because I would not have enough space to store entire system images. > Would you recommend a system wide backup or just a file backup? Well, most backup software will need the OS installed before you can do a restore, so keep that in mind. A few have "bare metal" restores, but I've not tried them. The real question here is: What is the most critical data? If you've got a server with a heavily tweaked registry and lots of custom stuff, then you'll want a full system image to make sure the system comes back with all your late night's worth of fixes still in place. If it's say a workstation, chances are that it's just the data that's important, and that the users can probably live with resetting their desktop wallpaper so long as they have all their research or spreadsheets or whatever (and of course the wallpaper...). > What type of software is good to use with backups? I probably need > something that can be installed on the users desktop and can be run > automatically without intervention. I will probably use windows 2000 > server as the OS to host the backup. We use Arkeia here in ACNS as our central backup solution. Personally, I wouldn't recommend it for big jobs. It doesn't scale particularly well, and we had some serious performance issues backing up large servers. > I need to support up to 70 users. All the desktops have windows XP > or windows 98. I am interested mainly in the software and backup > strategies people have used for there departments. There's a big table of backup software and supported OS's at: http://www.backupcentral.com/software-backup.html I'm not sure how up-to-date it is though. In terms of hardware for your backup server, you'll probably want a decent processor, but more importantly you'll want to look at a good RAID for the backup server. A lot of what a backup server does is catalog meta-data, and at least with Arkeia this meant a lot of disk I/O, and a fast SCSI RAID made a big difference in performance (we went to 15k RPM SCSI Ultra160 disks in RAID5). Also do yourself a big favor and get a tape loader instead of a stand-alone drive. It'll cost more, but it makes life a LOT easier and your backups won't stop the moment someone's not around to feed your stand-alone drive a new tape. As for software, as I mentioned I'm not personally fond of Arkeia. I haven't tried much in the way of other software, so unfortunately I can't make a good recommendation to you for that one, sorry. The backup strategy will depend a lot on how much data there is to backup, how many tapes you can afford to use, and how quickly you want to be able to find and restore the files you need. A typical backup strategy is full backups (all files) once a week, with incremental backups (only files that have changed) the remaining nights of the week. Hope that helps! -ED -- Edward Glowacki <[log in to unmask]>