Opinions on this backup strategy?

[RobertSF]

I have two computers networked through the internet router. They can see each other's drives no problem. They run Windows 7. I intend to partition each computer's hard drive into C: and D: partitions. The D: partition will be exclusively for backup. I'll schedule a task on each computer so that it runs IFW and does a full backup to the other computer's D: partition. I'll arrange it so that the D: partition fills with several full backups before deleting the oldest one.

My logic is that both hard drives are unlikely to fail or become corrupted at the same time, and I expect that if computer 2 goes down, I'll be able to fix it by running IFW on computer 1 and restoring the image for computer 2 that's on the computer 1 D: partition.

Is there any problem "pushing" a restore across a network that way?

Thanks!

By the way, a note to the forum admin, I tried searching, but every relevant term I searched came back empty because the term was "too common."

[TeraByte Support]

Using the network shares is fine. Always validate to ensure no issues.
For some tips if you have problems accessing target, see
http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/kb/article.php?id=377


"RobertSF" wrote in message news:[email protected]...

I have two computers networked through the internet router. They can see
each other's drives no problem. They run Windows 7. I intend to partition
each computer's hard drive into C: and D: partitions. The D: partition will
be exclusively for backup. I'll schedule a task on each computer so that it
runs IFW and does a full backup to the other computer's D: partition. I'll
arrange it so that the D: partition fills with several full backups before
deleting the oldest one.

My logic is that both hard drives are unlikely to fail or become corrupted
at the same time, and I expect that if computer 2 goes down, I'll be able to
fix it by running IFW on computer 1 and restoring the image for computer 2
that's on the computer 1 D: partition.

Is there any problem "pushing" a restore across a network that way?

Thanks!

By the way, a note to the forum admin, I tried searching, but every relevant
term I searched came back empty because the term was "too common."

[RobertSF]

Thanks for that kb article!

Though in case of a restore, it occurs to me that I'll still need to boot from CD on the computer that's down instead of restoring from the other computer because the drive needs to be locked to restore. I think so, at least?

[Brian K]

RobertSF wrote:

> Though in case of a restore, it occurs to me that I'll still need to boot
> from CD on the computer that's down instead of restoring from the other
> computer because the drive needs to be locked to restore.


TBWinRE and IFL will let you do a network restore.

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/howto/ ... torial.htm

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/tutori ... etback.pdf

[RobertSF]

Thank you for those helpful links, though I now realize it's not possible to do a system restore without a booting media of some sort. You can backup a system partition very flexibly (to network drive, to local data partition on same disk, to local USB/CD/DVD, etc.), but to restore a system partition, you have to boot the target computer in a way that allows its system partition to be locked. I don't know why that wasn't clear to me before; it's not as if I don't know it LOL

[DrTeeth]

>>though I now realize it's not possible to do a system restore without a booting media of some sort.

I assume you mean a CD or USB stick - if so, you are not 100% correct. I have various flavours of windows and linux installed on my PCs. IfW is installed in the Win 7 partition on all of them and can restore any of the other OSs across the network.

DrT