I read hanselman.com everyday. Scott keeps a list of his tools at hanselman.com/tools of which I use a few.
Most recently I have found a few good tools to handle Defragging and System Imaging.
Ultimate Defragger Free Edition (PLEASE read the PDF they include it is excellent): http://www.disktrix.com/UDFree.htm
Drive Imaging. Normally I use Acronis for my workstation but there "server" product is $900 PER SERVER and is not different than the desktop version. How do I know this.... well because up through v6 Acronis worked on our hosting server to make backups. Since v7 it gives you a nasty alert and says to use their server product. So I've been looking for a good alternative every since. I finally found one from Drive-Image.com called R-Drive Image which works very nicely on a new Windows 2003 Server I setup and restored recently. From what I've seen it uses better compression as well AND their license is only $49 regardless of the machine you will be using it on. The only problem I am having is restoring a 15gb image back to the full 250gb drive seems to be causing a problem in that I can't convert the Basic Drive to a Dynamic Drive to do a windows software mirror. Oh Acronis Home does NOT do dynamic drives either even on Windows XP. So my workstation which is using dynamic disks to mirror my OS and data drive sets does not work. R-Drive Image DOES and supports Shadow Copy as well. It's very nice and reasonable price.
Thx.
ReplyDeleteI have been using Acronis for a while - it's easy use/no fuzz.
I switched to win2008 as my workstation and found the same restrictions you did - bummer!
I will definitely try R-Drive Image.
I had some trouble with R-Drive initially. But it was do to my improper partisioning of the drive. Make sure to leave about 8mb or a little more at the end of the drive so it can put the dynamic drive data. R-Drive works really well and is priced correctly.
ReplyDeleteI have our "dev" server setup with two 250gb Sata drives using the built in mirroring in Windows 2003 Server. I have imaged and restored from that image as a test and it worked fine once I corrected my drive partitioning.