Backing up all user's computers

[bustell]

Does anyone out there work for a company that backs up ALL of their user's computers?

I work for a company that is proposing that we backup all 140-150 user's computers. About 25% of these computers are laptops that typically leave the building at night or desktops that may be turned off at night.

Since many of these computers would not be available for overnight backups we would need to be able to perform backups at all hours of the day including the normal workday hours when users may be using their computers.

Pitfalls? Issues? Benefits? Products that can handle this? IT Maintenance needs and issues?

Any thoughts, comments or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.



Pat B

 

[ProbablyDown]

Since many of these computers would not be available for overnight backups we would need to be able to perform backups at all hours of the day including the normal workday hours when users may be using their computers.

I would suspect the users would experience performance issues.
If you have VPN access, maybe some kind of centralized NAS setup where users can keep all their important stuff - then you can back that up at night?

 

[bustell]

We've considered using a storage device and shares but management doesn't like that idea.

I also failed to mention that we also have an off-site office with 10-12 people connecting back to our main site with VPN.


Pat B

 

[birky]

Could take a look at CommVault's Workstation Backup (WBA) option...block-level synch's the users data back to a centralised location whenever they hook up which can then be backed up

http://www.commvault.com/solutions-workstation-backup-recovery.html

Birky
CommVault Certified Engineer

 

[JPJeffery]

(Oh so many errant apostrophes in this thread!)

So, management would rather have user data stored (relatively) insecurely on (relatively) low availability machines distributed around the office with little or no file sharing instead of on a single device which users can access from any machine, would provide file sharing between people/depts., and which can be backed up and replaced more easily and uses RAID to maintain data integrity in the instance of hard drive failure.

Management are weird.

If you want to try to convince them again then point out that laptops can synchronise data between the central storage and the laptop itself so they can still access the data on the train while having the centralised backup in place.

JJ
[small][purple]Variables won't. Constants aren't[/purple]
There is no apostrophe in the plural of PC (or PST, or CPU, or HDD, or FDD, or photo, or breakfast...and so on)[/small]