Laptop Disaster Recovery

[cemich]

Hello,

 

I've got Retrospect running on a desktop with an internal tape drive. I'm using it to back up the desktop content and also the content of my laptop, which I copy over the network to the desktop.

 

What I'd like to do is use Retrospect for disaster recovery for my laptop. Is there a way to do all that through a mapped network drive, or do I need Retrospect on the laptop itself with a direct connection to the tape drive from the laptop?

 

 

 

[MrPete]

I've recovered over the network to laptops.

1) you'll have to preload a copy of the OS and the Retrospect client.

2) In my experience, it's best to enable the backup of file permissions. By default this is not done.... and caused us much grief during recovery. Many apps need specific security settings on files.

3) Once the laptop is running, do the over-network recovery. It is VERY nice. Loads everything in, replacing the temporary OS that you loaded in #1 above.

 

 

[blm14]

MrPete will that approach only work if your original backups were of "all files?" That is, if you used filters (like I do) you dont really end up with a bootable image.

 

More broadly speaking, you may be better off restoring the pre-crash contents to a new folder and actually use the new windows installation. I reformat my own machines every year or so - makes them peppier.

[MrPete]

Obviously, you can't restore what is not backed up.

 

We filter out temp files; that should never be a problem. Other than that, we back up everything.

 

Simply said, backup has two possible purposes:

* Recover from a human mistake (oops, deleted that file)

* Recover from a computer error (oops, drive died)

 

Partial backups help recover from human mistakes. Only full backups (other than temp/unneeded files) can recover from catastrophic computer errors.