Windows Restoration

[hawthorne]

We use Acronis here at work. You don't need same hardware, Acronis actually has a built in utility to restore an image file to differing hardware.
We have one server barebones image and one desktop barebones image. We roll out the image to any incoming hardware, then customise by department/server role. Very easy to use.

We also do a nightly image backup of our servers and they generally run in 30 mins and compress down to a few gigabytes each.

[pullzem]

I've been using Acronis for several years to mainly setup a new HD or clone a bootup disk to a new HD that's going to replace it. It has a great imaging choice that doesn't take long to create and it offers you the capability of making a bootup CD that will restore that image as long as it's on another drive...preferably an external one or you can make a partition on a 2nd HD in your PC just to hold the images in a rotational cycle.

I've kept the 2 HD's I cloned from...250GB with Vista Ultimate 64bit and most all my software and games loaded and a 160GB with Media Center Edition and the same loaded games and software. That would let me just swap either of those into their respective PC's, bootup and fix the problem on the HD causing me to have to do this...or just re-clone and go from there if it wasn't a hardware problem.

Acronis has no real competitor equal to it's capabilities and is well worth owning for upgrade purposes.

[kukmuk]

Acronis is great for personal use and emergency restoration at the Enterprise level (I use Acronis True Image with Universal Restore some at home), but for enterprise doing ALL initial installs with acronis isn't really feasible. When I did IT at Fidelity we used a combination of RIS and Acronis. Acronis only backed up domain controllers, everything else was done using a combination of RIS and Active Directory software deployments. If you are interested take a look into using RIS to install a base OS (NOT an riprep image!! A CD install), then a script or user intervention to drop the machine into a software install organizational unit inside of AD. At home I have different OU's for development machines, gaming rigs, media machines, etc... Each OU installs different things like codecs, games, applications, browsers or whatever I need on certain types of machines.

When you get into enterprise level applications like active directory there is really no limit with just the press of F12 on boot =)