Ask Slashdot: Networked Back-Up/Wipe Process? 253
An anonymous reader writes "I am required to back up and wipe several hundred computers. Currently, this involves booting up each machine, running a backup script, turning the machine off, booting off a pendrive, and running some software that writes 0s to the drive several times. I was wondering if there was a faster solution. Like a server on an isolated network with a switch where I could just connect the computers up, turn them on and get the server to back up the data and wipe the drives." How would you go about automating this process?
Re:Homebrew (Score:4, Interesting)
VMware's converter is what I ALWAYS use for this type of thing if I want easy access. I may clone 10-15 PCs a month to troubleshoot issues without bothering users, and to have a known broken system to test with, find a fix and quickly revert to broken to further test the fix.
You run through the setup on your PC, tell it what PC to clone, where to put the disk etc... (i normally put it back on the local drive since cloning over the network takes forever with slow links) and then fire it up in VM workstation or the free variant of it.
works great, and as said well above, you can fire up the PC again without worry for hardware. I did this grabbing a snapshot of my wife's late grandma's Win 3.1 PC about a year ago. damn thing took 35 minutes to boot up on her hardware, 5 seconds on my VM.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)