Currently looking for a backup solution
Hi,
We are currently looking for a backup solution in our company. I would like to know if Acronis Backup & Recovery Advanced Workstation would work for us. Here's what we are looking for :
- Although we have over 600 desktops and laptops in our company, we many of them have the same softwares installed. Most "front lines" desktops are all configured the same (ticket offices, reception desks, stores, customer services, etc). Doing the count, we would need about 10 images/backups with Universal Restore to cover all our pcs. Although all reception desks, for exemple, have the same software and configs, it's not always the same hardware. At this moment, we are using Clonezilla, but we have to clone every single desktop. Clonezilla does not support restoring to different hardware, even on a smaller disk. Having one backup of a reception desk desktop, which can be restored on any hardware would be wonderful for us.
- We would install a Windows agent (all desktops/laptops are Windows based) on specific machines (1 at a reception desk, 1 at a ticket office, etc) and we want these machines to backup daily or weekly using VSS (to be hot). Therefore, any Windows updates, software updates or config changes will be saved in the backup and will be up to date. The issue that we have now, is that some of our backups are 4 years old...which is completely irrelevant to restore because softwares have changed, new updates...having a job running automatically to update the backup would save us a lot of time when restoring.
- The solution also needs to be centralized. We are 4 IT techs working together, so we would need each of us a client that will remotely connect to the backup server. Ideally, the backup server would be in our VMware infrastructure, so a Windows Server (2008 R2 probably) VM. So all Windows agents would connect to the backup server and then it send their backup to a SAN.
Is Acronis Backup & Recovery Advanced Workstation enough for us ? Do we need anything else, such as a license to install on a Windows Server VM for a centralized server ? How well does Universal Restore works ?
Thank you,
Guillaume L.
Guillaume.
I have been using Acronis' product since it was True Image Echo and to date, after almost 5 years and every iteration you can possibly think of, we still cannot get a stable, functional install of this software package.
For all of your common systems, Acronis Snap Deploy would allow you to deploy an image to multiple systems in a multicast environment.
I have over 300 unique machines and need something that can keep file revisions straight. Acronis ABR products SHOULD be the correct package, but so far are nothing more than aggravation, pain and suffering. Not to mention almost $50K thrown down a hole.
Two days ago I updated to ABR 11.5 and have started fighting the tech support battle all over again. Installed for two days and three remote sessions already.
They seem to have solved my remote assistance issues though since now the storage node will NOT function in an environment with multiple NIC's and different address ranges. It wants to grab an IP address from both ranges, regardless of being statically assigned when you add the storage node server.
I have my systems in a VLAN and had added a second NIC to enable and swing my machine out for remote assistance.
That will not work any more, so I guess I'm done getting any remote help from Acronis.
True Image home 11 and 13 are both very good packages, avoid TIH 12 like the plague.
Other than that....
Good luck.
If there were another decent backup game in town, we'd be there in an instant.
As it is, each time I see an update, I pray that they have fixed this product. No luck to date.