[Wolves] e-smith - and a question about local domains

[James Turner]

On Saturday 12 Jun 2004 10:59, Mark Ellse wrote:
> David,
>
> That's a good question. At the moment I am relying on staff backing
> their machines up regularly 'by hand'. Most of the machines on the
> network are Win2k. How would you suggest doing that automatically?

Why not get them to redirect their "My Documents" folders, etc, to a location 
on a file server and back that up? I am strongly against people being able to 
save data to their local hard drives as it creates backup problems (usual 
situation: the data is never backed up).

If you specifically need the data to stay on the machines, then you could take 
advantage of the fact that Windows 2000 (and various other versions) 
automatically share all hard discs for access by the administrator, using 
names such as c$, d$, etc. (The $ character which instructs clients that the 
share is not to be displayed in the list of shares in "My Network Places" or 
equivalent).

You could use wake-on-LAN to ensure that the machines are switched on so that 
they can be backed up, then use a cron job to smbmount each one's c$ share to 
copy the files for backup.

I believe Windows 2000 also includes a "sychronise files" facility that keeps 
a local copy of files stored on a file server, updating them when they get 
changed. When we first upgraded to Win2k, I suffered a "sales pitch" by a 
Microsoft salesman telling me how wonderful this feature was. I've not had 
cause to use it myself, but it might be worth looking at if you really do 
need the data to be stored locally.

James