Making images of clints drives

[anglian]

Hi,

When do you make an image of a clients drive?
Are there any factors that make you decide yes or no to making an image?
Do you discuss it with your client, and explain the risks vs costs of having an image made and let them decide?

What software do you use for this & how long (per gb) does it take?

Thanks everyone, now back into the snow with my 6 year old son!!

 

[gikstar]

We try to image all of the computers that are brought to us... obviously we can't do that on-site. Imaging is the second think I like to do to the client's computer before working on it, the first is to remove the DUST and re-seat the ram.
Our tool of choice is Storagecraft as it seems to work faster than anything else we've used in the past. Speed, depends on your network connection to the NAS you backup to.

 

[Martyn]

I image most drives of computers brought back to the workshop, I just like to be covered. I use Acronis.

 

[anglian]

How about onsite repairs?

If you feel a PC needs an image to protect any data does that normally justify suggesting to the client that you take it back to our workshop?

 

[Painless]

I image any machine that I am going to work on the hard drive. It gives me peace of mind - if I screw up I can revert to when the machine arrived in the workshop. ( unless it's a Dell with raid 1 hard drives. )

I use Acronis TrueImage . It works from a live CD and you can access individual files from the image either using the CD or the bench machine over the network.


Sent from my HTC Desire using Tapatalk

 

[iisjman07]

We don't image every machine that comes through, we tend to image if it's a business customers machine or if its a very specific problem and we're likely to be hacking around the registry or whatever.

We use a Dos version of norton ghost. Personally I think it's very fast and reliable too. If I'm at home I usually use partimage because I use Linux. For data recovery on failing drives we use ddrescue; it's great.

 

[Martyn]

How about onsite repairs?

If you feel a PC needs an image to protect any data does that normally justify suggesting to the client that you take it back to our workshop?

I take most computers back to the workshop. My geography is that I'm only ever 10 or 15 minutes from home. Any on site just normally wouldn't be that much of a risk such as printer, network issues etc or training.

 

[dipper]

We use Acronis to image clients HDD's to the local hard drive on a tech machine.

We then regularly copy the images to a NAS at a later stage.

 

[kagman]

Hey Everyone.. Its been a long time since i have posted here.. Before I work on a clients computer I make an image of the system first. Especially if the clients system has a virus on it!!!! For onsite work since time is a factor it usually depends on the problem more like a case by case really. However 90% of my clients get there data backup no matter what...

 

[TimM]

I always image anything that has the potential to go horribly wrong. The need to do a disk image, for safety's sake, would be the most common reason that I would take a machine back to the workshop rather than continue with an onsite repair.
I use Terabyte Unlimited's tools... usually a boot CD copy of Image for Linux.