We've had a really weird week with our Windows 2003 servers, two of them seem to have forgotten about the domains they're supposed to belong to. They seem unable to authenticate against the domain controllers and when looking at share permissions all the local permissions resolve to names whereas all the domain permissions appear as a bunch of numbers separated by hyphens. I'm told by our IT department that only cure is a rebuild, rather harsh, but who am I to argue. Which brings me to the question......

Can any of you guys recommend a good cloning tool? I'd like to avoid any future fsckups by taking snapshots of all of my windows machines (Windows 2000/XP/2003) while they're working, so I can restore them sharpish in the event of a problem.

I've always used Ghost and NewSID, more recently booting from a Bart PE CD. Of course this method does nothing to deal with different hardware.

It's called "VMware Server", and it's a free download.

Install it on top of a mostly bare O/S (use Linux if you want to avoid having to purchase a second O/S license for this), and then run your Win2003 Server inside the virtual machine.

Presto -- you can now take perfect snapshots *while* it is running, at any time, and restore back to that exact state with the click of a mouse.

Cheers

Not really an option, both the servers run software that the vendors won't support under virtualisation. I use VMware where I can, but sadly these two have to run on real hardware.

Acronis True Image comes in a server variant.

I've never used any Acronis products, but they look quite good. Not outrageously expensive, either.

If you're happy to do without imaging, NTBACKUP does actually work. You'll need to keep an up-to-date recovery disk, though.

Andy, which products are these?

I second Acronis. I've used it before and it has never failed me.

ENPS by AP and Flip Factory by Telestream.

dd?

edit: ...running on a knoppix boot CD or similar. It does require a secondary drive to store the image, but an external USB drive will do the trick.

Or just cp or even cat for that matter.

-ml

ddrescue - it's got flashing lights...

Late to the thread here...

We've used Ghost & Ghostcast server with excellent results. That said, we recently did some RAID size upgrading & rearrangeing (Windows 2003 Server), and found two very useful tools for it:

GParted - a live CD or USB for partition copying, resizing, etc. for pretty much every format save Windows Dynamic Disks (bleah).

Clonezilla - probbably more along the lines of what you're looking for. I didn't use it b/c we already had Ghost, but worth a look.

-Zeke