Drive Cloning

[Spoiler]

Hi,
I want to start to clone my machine with macrium reflect. My question is would this let me clone my drive to a network share?

Thanks

[Geek-9pm]

After reading over you question, I will give a short ans a long answer.
Short answer, No.
Long Answer,  macrium reflectis a good way to backup you system so that you will have a copy of everything. But this does not create network share.

So ho does one make  network share?
When you copy files and folders you want  copies of everything except the files that are parts needed by the operating stem itself.  So the network share shall be a folder that contains the materiel you want to share.  In Windows you have the option to  make a a folder a share over the local network. This may be called a public folder.

Does that help any?
 

[Spoiler]

Thanks it did help.

It looks like this is not the software I need for what I want to do. What I am trying to do is to have a copy of my machine on a server so if my machine has a hardware failure I can fix it. After, download a complete copy from the server and do a restore.


 

[Geek-9pm]

OK. What you want can be done with backup software. But there are some details you need to investigate.
A few PCs can be set to boot from the network. Likely yours does not have that feature. The alternative is to have a CD or USB drive to boot the computer if the hard drive failed and was replaced with a blank drive.
The CD or USB drive must have a program the can read the special format used to copy the image of the operating system and the programs and data all in one integrated data set. The is often called an "image" of the hard drive.
To use macrium reflect  that way, you must first read over the documentation and practice on a spare computer. Personally I have used macrium reflect for a couple of years, but I would never tell somebody it is easy to understand. But with study and practice, you can do it.
Here are the two things to worry about:
Q.  How to you start a computer without an operating system?
A.  Change the BIOS to boot first from a USB device that has recovery software.
Q.  How do you get the image that was placed on a network share?
A    If needed, the image must be transferred to a portable hard drive .
These are the things That I have found to be areas of concern.

BTW:, some portable hard drives come with software. 

[patio]

The Paid ver. of Acronis True Image will do a clone backup to a Network share....

I know of none of the Free ones that will do this...and i've tested them all.

[DaveLembke]

Additionally if its a Windows XP system, your could buy Ghost 2003 off of ebay etc and this also supports sending images over network. I created a bootable floppy with NDIS2 Intel Pro100 Driver and then migrated an image of this floppy to CD so that I could boot a system up off this bootable CD which gives it a static IP address of 130.0.0.2 ( which i designated when creating bootable media ) for the system requesting image, and the system serving up the image over the LAN is 130.0.0.1.

Note: You need a bootable disc or disk for each Network Adapter driver that you chose to support. Its a manual process for an advanced Ghost 2003 user/admin. I have two of these one for Intel Pro 100 and another for older 3Com NIC. One trick I did was had a Intel Pro 100 PCI NIC, and I would install it temporarily to be able to have Ghost 2003 network support as well as for a fleet of systems at a prior work place we had corporate licensing of Ghost 2003 and I bought 50 good used Intel Pro 100 PCI network adapters off of ebay and populated all the workstations with this additional NIC. When a system needed to be rebuilt by image, I would move the LAN cable over to the Intel Pro 100 NIC, pop in the CD, boot the CD, and request the image to push to hard drive from the image server.

Later we ended up just going with RIS for many builds instead of using Ghost because all the many images for each workstation for custom configurations was eating up a lot of space back 10+ years ago when hard drive space came at a cost at 40GB images and hundreds of workstations.

[Spoiler]

Thanks for everyone in put.

Anyone ever try this one out?

http://clonezilla.org/

It looks like it has a server edition. It sound interesting.

[patio]

If it's anywhere close in price to Acronis i'd select Acronis...

Been the industry leader for many years.

[Spoiler]

Clonezilla is free but a pain to setup.

Here is another free one with network support.

http://www.paragon-software.com/home/br-free/

I am reading the manual and so far it looks like a good fit. I have to look deeper.

[patio]

I tested Paragon approx 6 months back...ran it 3 times on my Win7 rig...all of the images failed upon trying to restore...so i moved on.

[Spoiler]

Good to know. Thanks!

[patio]

Also take a look at Easus ToDo....i was impressed with my testing...

[Spoiler]

It looks pretty good. I am thinking about downloading a copy of ToDo and giving it a try.

[patio]

Make sure to "verify" the image after creating it....

[strollin]

One thing to think about when making a system image and saving it over the network, it will take awhile (hours) to make the backup and take awhile to do the restore.  Whole disk images are generally multi-gigabyte in size, lots of data to send over the network.

I prefer to use an external drive connected directly to the machine being backed up or restored.

[Spoiler]

Good point. I will keep that in mind. Right now I just want to try and test to see if I can get it to work. After I find out I will go for speed.

I installed the free version of ToDo and am getting ready to kick it off.

[patio]

Internal to internal clone is a bit quicker than External/USB...

[Spoiler]

I installed and started a backup. As expected it will take a long time across a network but it does work. I am going to look for a USB drive and than copy the img to the server.

Thanks for everyone's help!

[Salmon Trout]

when making a system image and saving it over the network, it will take awhile (hours) to make the backup and take awhile to do the restore.  Whole disk images are generally multi-gigabyte in size, lots of data to send over the network.

I just did an image backup using Macrium Reflect. My system drive is a 120 GB SSD with about 70 GB used. A backup to a folder on my NAS drive connected to the router took 31 minutes. I have done restores that took about the same. A backup to a 3 TB USB3 external drive connected to the PC takes around 20-25 minutes. My network is all gigabit ethernet.

One thing to watch is that Macrium may not see network drives when you come to select the folder where the image is to go. A registry change described at this page is needed. (or you can use the UNC path)

http://kb.macrium.com/KnowledgebaseArticle50208.aspx