Automated bare-metal recovery practices for small network

I had a play around with this idea once upon a time, my solution was to set up a DRBL (drbl.sourceforge.net/) Server so I could use PXE to boot Clonezilla (clonezilla.org/) which would then take an image without any user input (using a script). Restoring with another script is just as easy.

The computers were set to boot from LAN first, the default option being to continue booting from local disk. Come time for backing up a cron job would change the default option to the script and attempted to WOL or forced a restart so the target would boot and start imaging.

I haven't had much experience with Windows Server, but Im pretty sure it contains a method of booting PXE images? It would probably require a fair bit of effort to set up whereas the DRBL server worked out of the box. Though if you did have a spare box lying around, you could use it to make bare metal backups of your server as well.

Hmm.. in retrospect all of that is probably a bit too much for 3-5 computers (unless you desperately wanted automated imaging). In a previous workplace we had a couple of Acronis True Image (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.tib) cd's for more ad-hoc imaging/deployment. Sorry about the wiki link, apparently new versions have changed from when I last used it so there might be a few more options.

Also apologies for the crappy links in the brackets, apparently new users can't post more than one link.

This doesn't fit your needs exactly, but it is a good bare metal restore solution. ShadowProtect will back up the entire computer to an external drive. This is an image based backup. If you have a problem you can go back quite a way depending upon how you set up the backups. In the past I have set up a weekly full and differentials throughout the day on servers. On workstations you can do a monthly full with daily differentials.

Pros: -You can restore the computer to the way it was at a certain point in time.

• You can adjust the backups to fit your needs and back up every 15 minutes if you like.

• Workstation software is inexpensive.

• SBS version of the software is considerably less than the standard server version.

• Licensing is portable, so if you get a new computer you can move the license.

• Takes less time overall to restore.

Cons:

• No one click solution. Requires a boot from CD and a few questions answered about what point in time you would like to restore to.

• The more often you back up the less retention you have.

I have used this and it has saved me more than once with servers and workstations.