From: "Randy H" 

The ways I have used to restore W2K PC's quick is by an image restore
(Ghost) or a Disaster Recovery backup (Veritas/Stomp, Dantz Retrospect.)
The least quick way is a reinstall of W2K then using NTBACKUP to restore
the disk.

With the D/R backups, you typically wind up having to do a two-part install
of W2K-the first part loads the core OS, the second part uses a modified
install process to run the recovery from the backup media.

How different are each of your workstations? If they're all the same, I'd
create a bare naked W2K install of a machine that I could image onto a
bootable CD with Ghost. When you rebuild the roached machine, plop the CD
in, do the image restore, then reboot and run NTBACKUP to restore the
drive.

With WXP, Windows Activation poses enough roadblocks that you're better off
staying with image backups. Even though WXP has its Automated System
Recovery process, Windows Activation rears its ugly head and will more than
likely force a re-activation when the ASR process completes.


"Richard B."  wrote in message
news:blia3vkb4la2avh0ag7ggpaul6scsaq73s{at}4ax.com...
> I want to backup workstations so I can restore them in case of a hard
> disk crash.
>
> I plan to use the Windows backup utility and back up the entire PC
> once or twice a month. The idea is if a hard drive is lost, we can
> restore the system fairly quickly.
>
> My question is, do I need to back up the OS directory, typically
> WINNT? I am thinking when I restore, will the backed up system state
> data restore all files that applications might need, since a lot of
> .dll files are put in the OS directories? Or should I back up the
> entire drive, do a parallel installation, and then restore?
>
> What's the best way, other than image a drive since I don't have the
> money to spend on that for all PCs.
>
> - Richard

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