Windows disk imaging for backup with auto scheduling

backupdisk-imagewindowswindows-vista

I am after a way to automatically schedule a disk image backup of Windows Vistas x64 systems.

Required features

  • Ability to run on nightly schedule with no user involvement (so this takes out things like CloneZilla I think)
  • Easy way to restore using LiveCD or similar

Nice to haves

  • Open source / free, even for commercial use
  • Store image on network
  • Compression of disk (just missing out unused sectors is OK, preferably some compression)

Any recommendations – as far as I know the auto scheduling requirement means that I am limited to commercial solutions such as Ghost, Acronis TrueImage or http://www.drive-image.com/?

Best Answer

I'm currently using a combination of Bacula and Clonezilla.

Bacula for day-to-day backup and restoration of files as needed, Clonezilla for full disk (or partitions of the disk) imaging.

As with any backup solution, your backups are only good when you can actually use them to restore - I haven't found a good way to restore Bacula files on Windows yet to where I can only use Bacula.

With Clonezilla, you can setup a Clonezilla server, which handles DHCP by default (although this can be disabled if you already have a DHCP server in place). The Clonezilla server provides images which the clients can PXE boot off of, and then after booting from the image can run scripts to back up the entire disk, or just partitions of the disk. These disk images can be saved on the local disk or on the server, using ssh or samba.

Here are a few resources for Clonezilla Server: Ubuntu Community Documentation Clonezilla Server

Restoring the images are a snap because you just need to load up the livecd and point it at your remote server for the disk image (or external usb drive).

+1 for DriveImage XML - I've used it for Windows machines and had great success restoring the images. Just make sure that you verify the images before you need them. DriveImage XML has command-line switches allowing for scripted backup (and Task Scheduler) so that it can happen automatically. It also handles saving to remote samba directories.

Related Topic