What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?
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Hi all,
I know little about Imaging software.
I think we are talking about Imaging backup which doesn't reside in the system itself like Recovery Partition, through which we can restore the system to Factory default settings.
And I am aware of cloning software like CloneZilla, through which we can restore to that specific time (programs and settings). It doesn't seems practical for me to do it individually.
So we are talking about using at work and network backup/centralized one, preferably with an Agent will do good work ? Is that FOG kind of software referred to be as Imaging Software ?
I always had storage problem to try or start doing imaging to make things easier. Following are few confusions/queries :
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I believe imaging is the system backup, excluding data (or other partitions), unless we include.
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Lets say we are trying to take image of Windows machine (system/C partition only), if it's partition size is 100GB and used some 44GB for OS, what size imaging software will occupy after backing up ? 100 GB or 44 GB ?
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There will be any incremental and schedule kind of imaging backups ? to take back to working stage ? as it's not practical to take the PC back to zero (fresh Windows)...
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If FOG is an example for software referring to as reimage in this thread (https://mangolassi.it/topic/15746/why-restart-works-technical-reason/22)
So I need to setup FOG of some linux server, add storage (lets say some NAS) and take image backups on network, how will be the performance ? I am afraid it will kill the network. So user can work while image backup is going on ? -
Whether single windows image will work for different model machines (HP, Dell, Lenovo etc.), since they have different components and drivers ?
Thanks for response !
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@openit said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
Hi all,
I know little about Imaging software.
I think we are talking about Imaging backup which doesn't reside in the system itself like Recovery Partition, through which we can restore the system to Factory default settings.
And I am aware of cloning software like CloneZilla, through which we can restore to that specific time (programs and settings). It doesn't seems practical for me to do it individually.
So we are talking about using at work and network backup/centralized one, preferably with an Agent will do good work ? Is that FOG kind of software referred to be as Imaging Software ?
I always had storage problem to try or start doing imaging to make things easier. Following are few confusions/queries :
-
I believe imaging is the system backup, excluding data (or other partitions), unless we include.
-
Lets say we are trying to take image of Windows machine (system/C partition only), if it's partition size is 100GB and used some 44GB for OS, what size imaging software will occupy after backing up ? 100 GB or 44 GB ?
-
There will be any incremental and schedule kind of imaging backups ? to take back to working stage ? as it's not practical to take the PC back to zero (fresh Windows)...
-
If FOG is an example for software referring to as reimage in this thread (https://mangolassi.it/topic/15746/why-restart-works-technical-reason/22)
So I need to setup FOG of some linux server, add storage (lets say some NAS) and take image backups on network, how will be the performance ? I am afraid it will kill the network. So user can work while image backup is going on ? -
Whether single windows image will work for different model machines (HP, Dell, Lenovo etc.), since they have different components and drivers ?
Thanks for response !
There is a big difference between imaging and cloning of systems and backups. FOG is for cloning and creating images of systems.
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FOG doesn't do image backups per-say. It is 100% designed around golden image deployment. You have to boot from the network into a PXE environment and pull down the image after sysprepping it (fogprep?).
What is your goal here? Why do you want to take image level backups of desktops?
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@openit said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
Hi all,
I know little about Imaging software.
I think we are talking about Imaging backup which doesn't reside in the system itself like Recovery Partition, through which we can restore the system to Factory default settings.
And I am aware of cloning software like CloneZilla, through which we can restore to that specific time (programs and settings). It doesn't seems practical for me to do it individually.
So we are talking about using at work and network backup/centralized one, preferably with an Agent will do good work ? Is that FOG kind of software referred to be as Imaging Software ?
I always had storage problem to try or start doing imaging to make things easier. Following are few confusions/queries :
-
I believe imaging is the system backup, excluding data (or other partitions), unless we include.
-
Lets say we are trying to take image of Windows machine (system/C partition only), if it's partition size is 100GB and used some 44GB for OS, what size imaging software will occupy after backing up ? 100 GB or 44 GB ?
-
There will be any incremental and schedule kind of imaging backups ? to take back to working stage ? as it's not practical to take the PC back to zero (fresh Windows)...
-
If FOG is an example for software referring to as reimage in this thread (https://mangolassi.it/topic/15746/why-restart-works-technical-reason/22)
So I need to setup FOG of some linux server, add storage (lets say some NAS) and take image backups on network, how will be the performance ? I am afraid it will kill the network. So user can work while image backup is going on ? -
Whether single windows image will work for different model machines (HP, Dell, Lenovo etc.), since they have different components and drivers ?
Thanks for response !
1- Imaging is actual system backup and it is used for cloning.
2- If it is backup, it will take up to 44 GB, while if it is cloning it will take 100 GB for the image.
3- With Veeam it will take backups incrementally after a full backup.
4- FOG is a cloning software no backup software.
5- You should have images (For cloning) for each Hardware vendor. -
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For Linux, I've been using relax and recover successfully.
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I have used URBackup for Clients with Windows, LInux and MacOSX
https://www.urbackup.org/ -
Corning and imaging are two totally different things as the others have said. You need to define what you actually want to do here more clearly.
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@jaredbusch said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
Corning and imaging are two totally different things as the others have said. You need to define what you actually want to do here more clearly.
Okay. I believe I want to know more about Imaging. Actually the curiosity to know about Imaging arise from my previous post, where @scottalanmiller mentioned "Imaging should take around thirty minutes and, in reality, we are often getting that number lower and lower." It was regarding restoring the system when it is not working properly.
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@openit said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
@jaredbusch said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
Corning and imaging are two totally different things as the others have said. You need to define what you actually want to do here more clearly.
Okay. I believe I want to know more about Imaging. Actually the curiosity to know about Imaging arise from my previous post, where @scottalanmiller mentioned "Imaging should take around thirty minutes and, in reality, we are often getting that number lower and lower." It was regarding restoring the system when it is not working properly.
Yes which is fine, imaging is about restoring or setting up a system to an initial state where all the applications are installed and activated and ready to be used. It doesn't restore however the user's information.
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@dbeato said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
@openit said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
@jaredbusch said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
Corning and imaging are two totally different things as the others have said. You need to define what you actually want to do here more clearly.
Okay. I believe I want to know more about Imaging. Actually the curiosity to know about Imaging arise from my previous post, where @scottalanmiller mentioned "Imaging should take around thirty minutes and, in reality, we are often getting that number lower and lower." It was regarding restoring the system when it is not working properly.
Yes which is fine, imaging is about restoring or setting up a system to an initial state where all the applications are installed and activated and ready to be used. It doesn't restore however the user's information.
And that is the big difference in a nutshell. User and fix their computer, you apply fresh image and connect user documents
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@jaredbusch said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
@dbeato said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
@openit said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
@jaredbusch said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
Corning and imaging are two totally different things as the others have said. You need to define what you actually want to do here more clearly.
Okay. I believe I want to know more about Imaging. Actually the curiosity to know about Imaging arise from my previous post, where @scottalanmiller mentioned "Imaging should take around thirty minutes and, in reality, we are often getting that number lower and lower." It was regarding restoring the system when it is not working properly.
Yes which is fine, imaging is about restoring or setting up a system to an initial state where all the applications are installed and activated and ready to be used. It doesn't restore however the user's information.
And that is the big difference in a nutshell. User and fix their computer, you apply fresh image and connect user documents
Right, the thing to remember here - the desktop PC should have zero data on it. All data should be saved/synced to some place else so it can be accessed from a newly deployed image.
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@dashrender said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
@jaredbusch said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
@dbeato said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
@openit said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
@jaredbusch said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
Corning and imaging are two totally different things as the others have said. You need to define what you actually want to do here more clearly.
Okay. I believe I want to know more about Imaging. Actually the curiosity to know about Imaging arise from my previous post, where @scottalanmiller mentioned "Imaging should take around thirty minutes and, in reality, we are often getting that number lower and lower." It was regarding restoring the system when it is not working properly.
Yes which is fine, imaging is about restoring or setting up a system to an initial state where all the applications are installed and activated and ready to be used. It doesn't restore however the user's information.
And that is the big difference in a nutshell. User and fix their computer, you apply fresh image and connect user documents
Right, the thing to remember here - the desktop PC should have zero data on it. All data should be saved/synced to some place else so it can be accessed from a newly deployed image.
In my case at the only client that I can use imaging because they’ve purchased volume license of windows 10, we apply the image which includes the Nextcloud client we log into Nextcloud client let it download all their data again and then we change their documents desktop downloads etc. to point to the Nextcloud folder.
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@jaredbusch said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
@dbeato said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
@openit said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
@jaredbusch said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
Corning and imaging are two totally different things as the others have said. You need to define what you actually want to do here more clearly.
Okay. I believe I want to know more about Imaging. Actually the curiosity to know about Imaging arise from my previous post, where @scottalanmiller mentioned "Imaging should take around thirty minutes and, in reality, we are often getting that number lower and lower." It was regarding restoring the system when it is not working properly.
Yes which is fine, imaging is about restoring or setting up a system to an initial state where all the applications are installed and activated and ready to be used. It doesn't restore however the user's information.
And that is the big difference in a nutshell. User and fix their computer, you apply fresh image and connect user documents
This is why we stress "Use your home drive!". Most desktop don't have RAID, and user devices can go sour "just because". New drive, image computer, done. The users home drive (and other shares) are automatically mapped when they log in.
No need to transfer documents and downloads and such.
In the cases you do, you tell them to grab their stuff and put it in their home drive.
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@openit said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
@jaredbusch said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
Corning and imaging are two totally different things as the others have said. You need to define what you actually want to do here more clearly.
Okay. I believe I want to know more about Imaging. Actually the curiosity to know about Imaging arise from my previous post, where @scottalanmiller mentioned "Imaging should take around thirty minutes and, in reality, we are often getting that number lower and lower." It was regarding restoring the system when it is not working properly.
Right, so what I was referring to there was the making of a "Golden Image" where we have a pristine starting point from which we can rebuild a fresh machine very quickly (often about half an hour.) This image would need to be combined with a script or RMM or something (SS is designed to do this in the future) to take that Golden Image from bare to complete in a few minutes time (about half of the total 30 minutes, in theory.)
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@dbeato said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
@openit said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
@jaredbusch said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
Corning and imaging are two totally different things as the others have said. You need to define what you actually want to do here more clearly.
Okay. I believe I want to know more about Imaging. Actually the curiosity to know about Imaging arise from my previous post, where @scottalanmiller mentioned "Imaging should take around thirty minutes and, in reality, we are often getting that number lower and lower." It was regarding restoring the system when it is not working properly.
Yes which is fine, imaging is about restoring or setting up a system to an initial state where all the applications are installed and activated and ready to be used. It doesn't restore however the user's information.
Right, you either need to take backups of user data from the end user's machine and/or you need to store user data centrally so that you never have to deal with it on the end user's machine.
I have all of my data in NextCloud, for example. So all I need to do is restore NextCloud and pop in the password and my end user data is restored.
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@dashrender said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
@jaredbusch said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
@dbeato said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
@openit said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
@jaredbusch said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
Corning and imaging are two totally different things as the others have said. You need to define what you actually want to do here more clearly.
Okay. I believe I want to know more about Imaging. Actually the curiosity to know about Imaging arise from my previous post, where @scottalanmiller mentioned "Imaging should take around thirty minutes and, in reality, we are often getting that number lower and lower." It was regarding restoring the system when it is not working properly.
Yes which is fine, imaging is about restoring or setting up a system to an initial state where all the applications are installed and activated and ready to be used. It doesn't restore however the user's information.
And that is the big difference in a nutshell. User and fix their computer, you apply fresh image and connect user documents
Right, the thing to remember here - the desktop PC should have zero data on it. All data should be saved/synced to some place else so it can be accessed from a newly deployed image.
Zero data that matters, at least. With something like DropBox or NextCloud, we can have data on the machine, but it is always syncing to the server so that we can work with local files, but they are always stored on the server.
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@scottalanmiller said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
@dashrender said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
@jaredbusch said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
@dbeato said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
@openit said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
@jaredbusch said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
Corning and imaging are two totally different things as the others have said. You need to define what you actually want to do here more clearly.
Okay. I believe I want to know more about Imaging. Actually the curiosity to know about Imaging arise from my previous post, where @scottalanmiller mentioned "Imaging should take around thirty minutes and, in reality, we are often getting that number lower and lower." It was regarding restoring the system when it is not working properly.
Yes which is fine, imaging is about restoring or setting up a system to an initial state where all the applications are installed and activated and ready to be used. It doesn't restore however the user's information.
And that is the big difference in a nutshell. User and fix their computer, you apply fresh image and connect user documents
Right, the thing to remember here - the desktop PC should have zero data on it. All data should be saved/synced to some place else so it can be accessed from a newly deployed image.
Zero data that matters, at least. With something like DropBox or NextCloud, we can have data on the machine, but it is always syncing to the server so that we can work with local files, but they are always stored on the server.
I always like that approach compare to how Windows folder redirection with offline works.
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@black3dynamite said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
@scottalanmiller said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
@dashrender said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
@jaredbusch said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
@dbeato said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
@openit said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
@jaredbusch said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
Corning and imaging are two totally different things as the others have said. You need to define what you actually want to do here more clearly.
Okay. I believe I want to know more about Imaging. Actually the curiosity to know about Imaging arise from my previous post, where @scottalanmiller mentioned "Imaging should take around thirty minutes and, in reality, we are often getting that number lower and lower." It was regarding restoring the system when it is not working properly.
Yes which is fine, imaging is about restoring or setting up a system to an initial state where all the applications are installed and activated and ready to be used. It doesn't restore however the user's information.
And that is the big difference in a nutshell. User and fix their computer, you apply fresh image and connect user documents
Right, the thing to remember here - the desktop PC should have zero data on it. All data should be saved/synced to some place else so it can be accessed from a newly deployed image.
Zero data that matters, at least. With something like DropBox or NextCloud, we can have data on the machine, but it is always syncing to the server so that we can work with local files, but they are always stored on the server.
I always like that approach compare to how Windows folder redirection with offline works.
What do you mean? Granted Windows offline often fails, but how is it in theory different?
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@dashrender said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
@black3dynamite said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
@scottalanmiller said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
@dashrender said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
@jaredbusch said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
@dbeato said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
@openit said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
@jaredbusch said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
Corning and imaging are two totally different things as the others have said. You need to define what you actually want to do here more clearly.
Okay. I believe I want to know more about Imaging. Actually the curiosity to know about Imaging arise from my previous post, where @scottalanmiller mentioned "Imaging should take around thirty minutes and, in reality, we are often getting that number lower and lower." It was regarding restoring the system when it is not working properly.
Yes which is fine, imaging is about restoring or setting up a system to an initial state where all the applications are installed and activated and ready to be used. It doesn't restore however the user's information.
And that is the big difference in a nutshell. User and fix their computer, you apply fresh image and connect user documents
Right, the thing to remember here - the desktop PC should have zero data on it. All data should be saved/synced to some place else so it can be accessed from a newly deployed image.
Zero data that matters, at least. With something like DropBox or NextCloud, we can have data on the machine, but it is always syncing to the server so that we can work with local files, but they are always stored on the server.
I always like that approach compare to how Windows folder redirection with offline works.
What do you mean? Granted Windows offline often fails, but how is it in theory different?
One was in theory designed to work, and one was not
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@dashrender said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
@black3dynamite said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
@scottalanmiller said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
@dashrender said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
@jaredbusch said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
@dbeato said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
@openit said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
@jaredbusch said in What exactly imaging software, any open source or free options ?:
Corning and imaging are two totally different things as the others have said. You need to define what you actually want to do here more clearly.
Okay. I believe I want to know more about Imaging. Actually the curiosity to know about Imaging arise from my previous post, where @scottalanmiller mentioned "Imaging should take around thirty minutes and, in reality, we are often getting that number lower and lower." It was regarding restoring the system when it is not working properly.
Yes which is fine, imaging is about restoring or setting up a system to an initial state where all the applications are installed and activated and ready to be used. It doesn't restore however the user's information.
And that is the big difference in a nutshell. User and fix their computer, you apply fresh image and connect user documents
Right, the thing to remember here - the desktop PC should have zero data on it. All data should be saved/synced to some place else so it can be accessed from a newly deployed image.
Zero data that matters, at least. With something like DropBox or NextCloud, we can have data on the machine, but it is always syncing to the server so that we can work with local files, but they are always stored on the server.
I always like that approach compare to how Windows folder redirection with offline works.
What do you mean? Granted Windows offline often fails, but how is it in theory different?
Windows caches data in C:\Windows\CSC instead of keeping the data on C:\Users\users1.
With Nextcloud, your data is always in C:\Users\users1\Nextcloud but then data is sync back to the server.
