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Backup 5 PCs to one location

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Hi guys,

 

Been using Acronis True image for a couple of years, but it's been very limited use to be honest.

I create a USB stick, clone the OS drive after everything is installed nicely, and save it for emergencies.

I've never used the main "application" to do full backups or anything else more than that.

 

Anyway now I'm running a home-lab with 5x Windows 10 machines, and I'm curious if the 5 user license of True Image 2021 is what I need.

For reference 3 of the 5 machines are actually Dell R630 Servers (Windows 10 Pro), so as far as I'm concerned they're just Windows PC's.

But as the R630 have 8 drives in a Raid, I'd like to use one of them as the central store/backup location for everything.

 

Now I read somewhere that I cannot backup to a mapped drive, but you can to a network share (\\MyServer\MyPath).

So can I just create a single share on one of my PCs, and have all 5 PC's do backups to a single location?

 

Many thanks

 

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Darren,

You can share a folder like you want in Windows 10 Pro. 

  • First create the folder in your desired location and name it, let's say My Backups
  • With that folder created right click on it and select Properties
  • Click on the Sharing tab in the window that appears
  • Tick the Share this folder box
  • Click on the Permissions button
  • Set who and what permissions you wish to grant as needed
  • When finished click on Apply.

That's it.

Darren, if all of your 5 PC's are running Windows 10 Pro and not running a Windows Server OS, then there should be no reason why you can't back them all to a network storage destination.

The nature of the disk drives in each PC should be transparent to Acronis with any RAID arrays appearing as a single drive etc.

In terms of using a single server destination, then I would recommend using separate folders for each different PC being backed up as this will help avoid any confusion later - you should also try to use backup task names that are descriptive / self-explanatory so that the files are easily identified in the destination location.

One further comment, test your USB rescue media and ensure that you understand how to connect to your chosen network server from that environment, as this is how you may need to perform any future recovery.

Thanks guys.

 

That's exactly what I managed to do.

Shared a drive on my backup machine/server, and mapped that as a drive on all other machines.

As suggested I created sub-folders for each PC, which will make managing this much easier.

 

The dashboard is pretty cool, which I haven't used before.

I can start backups for all PC's from a single dashboard, that's awesome.

 

Completed full OS backups yesterday in record time. But I do have 10Gbe network at home, so this is the first time I really put it to the test :)

 

Darren,

Glad to hear that you were able to accomplish your goal.  Enjoy!