System Image Backup and file synchronization?

general discussion
1

Hi!
I have a network with approx 60 Windows 8.1 computers, not connected in a domain. I’m currently using some robocopy scripts that does the file backup from each computer, and saving log files to a SMB share where I can “monitor” which computers have run the last week.

I currently don’t have any image backups available, something I would really like, but while I like the Windows integrated system image backup, I don’t see how I can remotely administrate it, meaning I have to manually check 60 computers, or the share, but I can’t really verify that it is running correctly on all computers. And having to check both file backup and system backup manually seems like a big hassle for that many computers, and I don’t really get a warning if something hasn’t been copied.

That’s where I discovered UrBackup

The computers content is rarely modified, but I would like weekly file backup (a sync actually) in addition to the image backup, and I really just need a simple system image backup, one, maybe updated once a month, or every second month.

After installing the server, and a client, I saw that there was a lot of settings on how many incremental backups etc. I wanted. To be honest this seems overly complicated for what I need, is UrBackup simply to advanced for just file sync and a system image backup?

What I want is:

Every week - Sync"D" drive towards a network share
Every month - Update system image

Is this possible? I like sync better, so the backup doesn’t have a lot of deleted files.
Of course, this means that if a file IS deleted by error, there is an average 3.5 days to recover, in worst case it’s deleted and synced straight after.

The content each computer varies from 10-250GB, so I’d rather not have a lot of multiple file backups, but of course it could be possible with keeping two backups, and file backup every second week, keeping the backup for up to a month. Would that be possible without actually making a full backup each time?

The system image backup could in theory be once a year because of the rarely updated machines, and we only need one really…

Suggestions?

2

I think you misunderstand how UrBackup works.

If a computer has 250GB of files on it, it does not store a fresh copy of every single file on each file backup. If there are 250GB of files on the computer, but only 1GB of files get changed between each backup, then each subsequent backup will only cost you 1GB of storage space.

Any files that are common between the PCs will only have one copy on the UrBackup server. As an example, if for some reason you had 10 computers that all have the exact same 50GB file on them, backing up that file on all 10 computers would only cost you 50GB of space, not 500GB.

But yes, through configuration settings, you could have UrBackup do exactly what you want, but I do not think it would be necessary. It would be even less necessary if your UrBackup server has deduplication.

3

I would like to keep this discussion going as this is almost the same thing i would like to accomplish. I basically want a image once a month so i can do a full system restore in case of catastrophic failure and a file backup of selected folders with a full/incremental schedule. I am not sure exactly how to set it up so that it sees both schedules.

I am working with v1.5