Best solution for backing up / imaging across network / LAN

Just a point on terminolgy - When you say an image backup I think you mean a backup taken such that if your drive crashes you can buy a new one restore the backup and you'll boot into windows as if nothing ever was wrong.

To my understanding for an image backup to be taken then acronis needs to backup all files even those windows has locked or otherwise open for write. The above is just one of the tricks needed, the other is the backup needs to be a "read consistent" (point in time) of the entire drive. In otherwords when the backup starts you get the entire drive from start to finish as it looked at that microsecond in time even if the backup takes an hour to make during that hour you are free to modify files on the drive and acronis deals with this fact. The .dll which lets acronis do both of these magic tasks is installed by acronis when you install the product. All of the above means if acronis is not installed on a pc then one can not make an image backup of it.

However all is not totally lost, you can do file/data backups of any drive your pc can mount/touch. so if you install acronis on a PC you can image any drive that physically cabled on that PC and all drives phyically cabled to other pc's on the network you are religated to just file/data backups. With file/data backups you get neither locked file majic nor the read consistent magic. So if you backup an entire c:\ drive a networked pc you will NOT be able recover from its crash the way you would a local drive but you will at least have the datafiles (well at least those that were not locked at the time of the backup).

I think there are acronis products that let you centrally manage backups of acronis installed throughout the network, I'm not familiar with those, just acronis TI.

Hello Thong,

I understand your question and will do my best to give you clear explanation.

If I understand you correctly you would like to backup and restore computers across the network? Well it depends on the operating systems you have on source and destination computers. For non-server versions of Windows on all machines I may suggest you Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Advanced Workstation.  Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Advanced Workstation can be installed on the following operating systems:

- Windows 2000 SP (Service Pack) 4+

- Windows XP SP2+ x32 and x64 Editions

- Windows Vista all SP x32 and x64 Editions

- Windows 7 x32 and x64 Editions

Using Management Console you will be able to access remote computers for backup (disk imaging) or restore purposes. Look through user guide for more details about the product components.

For server versions of Windows I may suggest you Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Advanced Server.  Supported operating systems are the following:

- Windows 2000 Server SP 4+

- Windows 2003 Server SP 2+ x32 and x64 Editions

- Windows 2008 Server SP2 x32 and x64 Editions

- Linux with kernel 2.4.18 or later (including 2.6.x kernels) and glibc 2.3.2

- Examples of distributions include:

          Red Hat Enterprise 5 & 4

          CentOS 5 & 4

          Fedora 10 & 9

          Ubuntu 8.10 & 9.04

          Debian 4

          SLES 10

          OpenSUSE 11

          Asianux 3.0

Oracledba the driver you are talking about is SnapAPI driver. Here is a description of the unique Acronis Snapshot technology:

Once Acronis True Image initializes the backup process of a volume (which logically corresponds to a single partition, if there are no Dynamic Disks), Acronis Snapshot Manager flushes the file system mounted to that volume temporarily freezing all the operations on the system volume. Immediately thereafter, the Snapshot Manager driver creates a point-in-time view of the system volume and a bitmap describing the used sectors on this volume. Once the bitmap is created, the filter driver unfreezes the I/O operations on the system volume. It generally takes only several seconds to create a point-in-time view of the volume. After that, the operating system continues working as the imaging process is under way.

Acronis True Image reads the sectors on the system volume according to the created bitmap. Once a sector is read, the appropriate bit in the bitmap is reset. In its turn, the Acronis driver continues working to hold the point-in-time view of the system volume. Whenever the driver sees a writing operation directed at the system volume, it checks whether these sectors are already backed-up, if they are not, the driver saves the data to the sectors that will be overwritten to a special buffer created by the software, then it allows the sectors to be overwritten. Acronis True Image backs up the sectors from the special buffer, so that all the sectors of the point-in-time view of the system volume will be backed up intact. Meanwhile, the operating system continues working and the user will not notice anything unusual in the operating system functionality.  

Note that using Acronis bootable disc you can also create disk imaging.

Let me know if you have further questions.

Thank you.