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[wally]

Need to say, I haven't fully tested out the memeo app bundled with my new DNS-321 because it appears not to include a means of restoring a PC without first re-installing the OS. (I could be wrong but that's my first impression).

I've been browsing the net for alternatives and would appreciate your advice. I installed SelfImage but am too doofus to understand how to get that app to see the DNS. I made a CloneZilla CD and basically understand the routine but somewhere along the way (probably where it asks for the network protocol) I screw up. NFS is out, Samba is presumably slow.... I briefly tested a Macrium Reflection app that seems promising, but .... oh well, below is the reason I bought the DNS-321 in the first place.

After years of juggling and upgrading and imaging redundant HDDs to fit into our various desktop and notebook PCs here at home (most with dual-boot Win/Linux setups), and having only one to really flat-out crash, I decided I'd rather just have a NAS and automate backups from all the machines into one big drive, for the eventual day that something (other than the DNS) breaks. Should that happen, I can drive down the street to BigBox, buy a replacement HDD, and restore a drive or partition image with a lot less fuss.

I'd like to be able to schedule the cloning of complete partitions (or even complete drives) into files on the DNS drive (A 1TB WD Greenie); if I can't schedule it, I'd at least like to be able to manage it all (for five LANed PCs) manually but from just one console.

Caveats
I can hardly write a batch file any more complicated than a DOS autoexec.bat, let alone program code.
I've spent most of the budget pretty much on hardware.
I'll possibly be happy just to have backups of data if I can't manage to clone complete environments (though I've wasted a fair share of my life re-installing assorted versions of Windows, and hate the thought of having to go through that yet again...)

[mig]

I like Acronis v10 (http://www.acronis.com/) for bare metal backup and restore.

[wally]

Thanks I downloaded their trial package and will see how it goes.

[fordem]

Earlier versions of Acronis have worked well for me (I haven't tried the later ones) - one point to note is - how well it works may depend on the hardware (so to speak, the bare metal) you're running - the ethernet card needs to be supported by Acronis.

[wally]

I installed the trial "Home" version of Acronis and it seems to do okay. I sensed a certain familiarity with something Apricorn and then on booting up the standalone CD, realized this is a superset of the EZ Gig II package I have used when upgrading my HDD. Almost identical but probably with some additional, useful features. I'm happy to report the CD has no problem with my Thinkpad's Broadcom ethernet adapter and appears ready to let me do whatever with images stored on the DNS-321. Haven't yet tried it with our two latest PCs (homebrews with Realtek-equipped Gigabyte boards). Still experimenting with and learning about other options.

The idea of backing up other networked PCs from one console still appeals but I'm new to all this even in WinXP and only casually familiar with the many tools of Linux, so it may be awhile before I figure how to use NAS-server (-client) apps in Ubuntu, etc etc. SelfImage seems able to let me do these things if/when I assimilate the basic understanding of how the NBD feature works.

Macrium Reflect also seems to show real promise, comparable to Acronis, but the bootup CD it let me create didn't seem quite as robust.

As mentioned earlier, I've also been playing around with SelfImage, which for its simplicity attracts me the most.

All three of these apps back up partitions to the DNS-321 over a gigabit connection at around 16-20 Mbytes/sec. They have write bursts that are at times unbelievable but I think that's all due to the compression algorithms they use. SelfImage backs up my Ubuntu partition (probably about 7 GB on a 153 GB partition) in 5-6 minutes, using medium compression and "skipping" unused sectors. It shows speeds 400-900 mbits/sec which I know is not happening, but it's extremely fast (to me) nonetheless.

Macrium (trial version) also moves bits at close to SelfImage speed, but one problem I face is, SelfImage apparently has no mechanism for on-the-fly verify and the trial-version Macrium requires that you verify after the image has been created (apparently the retail version at least lets you add verification to the image backup process but I wouldn't know if it's faster). In Macrium the verify process alone takes significantly longer than the image creation stage, maybe even double the time. Because SelfImage is open-source, I suppose someone with smarts could look under the hood so to speak and configure the compression engine to verify on-the-fly, but I am only speculating and have no idea whether this is actually possible. Perhaps someone could tell me whether or not it's even necessary.... Acronis presumably verifies backup images when it's finished creating them (but at least it does it).

[wally]

One thing I should have mentioned ..... I haven't actually *restored* anything with any of these apps so I'm not certain at all how well they perform in that area. (Maybe it would be wise to set up a test PC for this purpose ... I have several old Pentium-3 machines collecting dust in the garage ....) I'd be comfortable with Acronis on this count right away, though, having restored numerous images with the dumbed-down version it wrote for Apricorn.