NTBackup and folder redirection

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capitan

Hi all. Right now I am evaluating what would be the best way for our
company to provide a type of automated client backup setup for our
workstations. I am considering both NTbackup and folder
redirection/offline files. I have some questions about each:

NTBackup:

Is there a difference between NTbackup in a w2ksp4 (with all critical
update patches) client vs. a XP sp2 (with all critical update patches)
client? Keeping in mind I do not need to access any Windows 9x msbackup
(I know that there is an issue there, but it doesn't affect us).

Are there any gotchas we would run into if we ran ntbackup on the
clients through a login script mabey (esp if we are doing this on both
w2k and xp clients)?

Folder redirection:

Someone told me that folder redirection requires roaming profiles. Is
this true? I was hoping it would be something we could implement
through global policy instead of having to enable roaming profiles.

Thanks in advance for any responses!
 
capitan said:
Hi all. Right now I am evaluating what would be the best
way for our company to provide a type of automated client
backup setup for our workstations. I am considering both
NTbackup and folder redirection/offline files. I have
some questions about each:
Click to expand...
Not a direct answer to your question, but you were not
considering full backups of the whole of the client machine,
were you? All you really need is the files that the user
saves on that machine. If you encourage them to keep the
files on the files servers, then the local drives don't
matter too much. If they have to put files on the local
drives, then encourage them to use the "My Documents" folder
and back that up, and their user profiles. I'd use xcopy or
robocopy for the job.

Cheers,

Cliff
 
Enkidu said:
Not a direct answer to your question, but you were not
considering full backups of the whole of the client machine,
were you? All you really need is the files that the user
saves on that machine. If you encourage them to keep the
files on the files servers, then the local drives don't
matter too much. If they have to put files on the local
drives, then encourage them to use the "My Documents" folder
and back that up, and their user profiles. I'd use xcopy or
robocopy for the job.

Cheers,

Cliff
Click to expand...

Hi Cliff and thanks for the reply. Yes, you are right, I am just
talking about backing up data files, not the entire workstation. Noone
here likes being connected directly to the server because if it goes
down, they can't get to their stuff. For years we have been trying to
get our users to keep all of their stuff in the my documents directory,
even to the point of pointing all of their programs data directory
settings there by default. They still inevitably save user files to the
desktop amongst other places and do not keep them all in my documents.
We are also looking to automate the backup process and to do
differential backups each day for each user. Unfortunately, I've been
told to research both of these methods and not given much choice about
looking at other options. So what I really need is answers to my
specific questions. Here's one more - is there any way to do a
differential backup with xcopy?
 
capitan said:
Hi Cliff and thanks for the reply. Yes, you are right, I am just
talking about backing up data files, not the entire workstation. Noone
here likes being connected directly to the server because if it goes
down, they can't get to their stuff. For years we have been trying to
get our users to keep all of their stuff in the my documents directory,
even to the point of pointing all of their programs data directory
settings there by default. They still inevitably save user files to the
desktop amongst other places and do not keep them all in my documents.
We are also looking to automate the backup process and to do
differential backups each day for each user. Unfortunately, I've been
told to research both of these methods and not given much choice about
looking at other options. So what I really need is answers to my
specific questions. Here's one more - is there any way to do a
differential backup with xcopy?
Click to expand...

xcopy be used for differential or incremental backups:

xcopy /d . . . . is equivalent to a differential backup: It will copy those
files that are new or that have a more recent file date than the existing
backup version.

xcopy /m . . . . is equivalent to an incremental backup: It will copy
only those files whose archive flag is set.

I recommend you use xcopy /d.

You can go one step further and run xxcopy.exe (downloadable
from many sites). It has a switch that will synchronise folders, i.e.
it will delete files and folders in the target area if they no longer
exist in the source area.
 
capitan said:
Hi Cliff and thanks for the reply. Yes, you are right, I
am just talking about backing up data files, not the
entire workstation. Noone here likes being connected
directly to the server because if it goes down, they
can't get to their stuff.
Click to expand...
And how many times does the server go down? Ask them! It
shouldn't go down at all during working hours (hopefully).

It really depends on how tough you can be on them. If you
can insist that nothing get backed up if it isn't in "My
Documents", then there is no problem. If you can't (maybe
for political reasons), then you'll have to backup more, I
guess.

Cheers,

Cliff
 
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