I recently purchased a WHS for my home, and it works very well. I especially enjoy the backup features. I just started working at a non-profit hospital here in Malawi (Beit Cure International Hospital), which has around 50 workstations, with Server 03 and AD. My main question is, how can I back up all of the workstations with a similar functionality as WHS. How do most companies back up their workstation data? What are some best practises? Should I just purchase 5 WHS machines or maybe run 5 WHS VM instances... An intriguing idea, just for $500.

Hi Umiwangu,Thank you for posting in windows server forum, For enterprise backup , we normally use backup solutions from veritas, HP etc.. . Your question depends on how much data needs to be backup everyday from these workstations and windows 2003 server ? ,Eventually you are backing up on to either Tape or Hard disk in your environment. You can use windows 2003 server inbuild Backup softwaer which performs great job of backing up and restoring the data. I would suggest you can take a tour of backup utility from windows 2003 .Start menu, navigate to Programs > Accessories > System Tools and click Backup.And do let us know your opinionsainath !analyze

Hi Umiwangu, Thank you for posting in windows server forum, For enterprise backup , we normally use backup solutions from veritas, HP etc.. . Your question depends on how much data needs to be backup everyday from these workstations and windows 2003 server ? ,Eventually you are backing up on to either Tape or Hard disk in your environment. You can use windows 2003 server inbuild Backup softwaer which performs great job of backing up and restoring the data. I would suggest you can take a tour of backup utility from windows 2003 . Start menu, navigate to Programs > Accessories > System Tools and click Backup. And do let us know your opinion sainath !analyze Thanks Sainath, Would any of the solutions from Veritas, HP or others be suitable for a small number of workstations (in this case, about 50). As far as amounts of data, I think about 50 MB per day per workstation. Maybe as much as 100 MB. This would be with incremental backups (or are they differential?). We would be backing up to hard drive, either in a NAS or a separate drive in the server itself. I've used the built-in backup program before, but it creates a complete image each time it does a backup (taking several hours), and it requires a floppy disk. Not suitable for workstations. Any other ideas?

Regardless of the backup solution that you may choose for your organization, best practice is that user data not be stored on workstations, but on dedicated file servers. It is not practical to attempt to back up individual workstaions. You may not be able to predict where all of the user data will reside. What if the users turn off their computers at night? However, if you deploy a file share server, your users will save their data in a centralized location. You can easily create a backup strategy to ensure that user data is protected.In addition, you can use Active Directory policies to redirect user's folders such as "My Documents" so that when a user accesses this folder on the local computer, it is actually redirected to the file server in this example. You can do the same with the "Start Menu" and other important folders that contain user specific data.Visit my blog: http://www.anITKB.com

Yes Jorge is completely right I prefer theuser data should not be stored on the worstations. The other way round will be creating the shared folders on the server and mapping it on the workstation where the users can store there data which can be .doc,.xls..pdf and etc. By using this practice you can centrally backup the data from the server.Thanks Syedhttp://technetfaqs.wordpress.com

Regardless of the backup solution that you may choose for your organization, best practice is that user data not be stored on workstations, but on dedicated file servers. It is not practical to attempt to back up individual workstaions. You may not be able to predict where all of the user data will reside. What if the users turn off their computers at night? However, if you deploy a file share server, your users will save their data in a centralized location. You can easily create a backup strategy to ensure that user data is protected. In addition, you can use Active Directory policies to redirect user's folders such as "My Documents" so that when a user accesses this folder on the local computer, it is actually redirected to the file server in this example. You can do the same with the "Start Menu" and other important folders that contain user specific data. Hi Jorge, Ah. This makes a bit more sense. The only problem we have here is that the network is not reliable. Can users access their data if the network is down? We can definitely look into folder redirection. Would these help with bare-metal restores? Although I guess if user info is stored on the server, then it's less work to restore a crashed workstation.

Yes Jorge is completely right I prefer theuser data should not be stored on the worstations. The other way round will be creating the shared folders on the server and mapping it on the workstation where the users can store there data which can be .doc,.xls..pdf and etc. By using this practice you can centrally backup the data from the server. Thanks Syed http://technetfaqs.wordpress.com Thanks Syed, we'll have to look into this. Obviously our network will have to be pretty robust before we can do it. Seth

In any industry core services and infrastructure are very important. I think you have many concerns that need to be addressed. Simply prioritize based on risk. This is a business decision, not necessarily IT. Fix the issues that are most likely to cause an impact to the organization first. I think it is very important to stabalize your network. That shouldnt be to expensive. Then standardize on the way data is stored and secured. I would also recommend that you standardize on your desktops as well. Try to develop a standard base image that can be easily deployed. Develop policies and procedures. This is needed regardless of the size of your network for you to be able to keep costs down, especially for non-profit organziations. You should feel very content to be in this position, there is alot of opportunity for learning and gaining experience.

In any industry core services and infrastructure are very important. I think you have many concerns that need to be addressed. Simply prioritize based on risk. This is a business decision, not necessarily IT. Fix the issues that are most likely to cause an impact to the organization first. I think it is very important to stabalize your network. That shouldnt be to expensive. Then standardize on the way data is stored and secured. I would also recommend that you standardize on your desktops as well. Try to develop a standard base image that can be easily deployed. Develop policies and procedures. This is needed regardless of the size of your network for you to be able to keep costs down, especially for non-profit organziations. You should feel very content to be in this position, there is alot of opportunity for learning and gaining experience. Hi Jorge, You are definitely right. It's just difficult to get things done with limited time/resources, especially in a 3rd-world country for a company that runs as a charity. We are moving towards a standard desktop and deployment, so it'll be good to have data management in the background of these decisions. As you said, it's a great opportunity to learn (being thrown in feet-first) and it'll be exciting to see where this goes. Thanks again for the help. Seth