We use two products a lot: (i)MozyPro; and (ii)Backup Exec System Recovery (which comes in versions for the various desktop and server operating systems).
MozyPro is a good price point for our smaller customers and has been nearly flawless. We’ve discovered one instance in which it doesn’t work well, but that is associated with Exchange servers, not likely an issue for a desktop. Its only fault is that it sometimes does not retry when it cannot get a connection. Its good point is that it only backs up changed files on the block level, which makes it very efficient. It is not the fastest way to do a recovery if you have a large amount of data. You can download that data from their website, which will take time and risk some corruption or you can have them send it to you on DVD. Its a good offsite service though and available from anywhere you have an internet connection. With this option you will still need to reinstall the operating system and most of your applications and then restore the data. (Unless what you are backing up is an image file of your system.)
System Recovery costs about $50.00 for desktop operating systems. It is much like the old Ghost. Makes an image to a hard drive device and then allows you to restore same. It is easy to manage, very configurable (automatic backups, manual backups, different kinds of backups). The best thing about System Recovery is that is “bare metal” capable. You can restore to any hardware so long as you have the appropriate drivers available. So you can restore to another machine, or the same machine with a different NIC, etc., etc., etc. Typical time to restore a desktop is about 20 minutes and it will look EXACTLY like it did before hand - all applications functional, all shortcuts in place, backgrounds - everything. It is an image, you restore the image and your operating system and applications will be restored in a fully functional state - no reinstalls. It is my choice for recovery, the one I use on both my personal and business machines. Quite frankly, it is the only backup I use at some of my customer locations. It has the advantage of allowing you to backup to hard disk devices (which are inexpensive) as opposed to high volume tape devices (which are very expensive).
I’m a very practical person - I only get enthusiastic about new technology and devices if they do they have a real function and they work. These two options meet both those criteria.
I am looking for something to backup the WinXP operating system on each of our 3 machines, once I have it reformatted, and all drivers, updates, and basic software we use loaded. I know this sounds weird to most, but unlike others, I’m not attached enough to any data on our computers to worry about backing it up. I’m just interested in making a clean copy of the OS with my basic software loaded so that when I reformat, it doesn’t take a whole day to get it going again in a usable form.
So I googled Backup Exec System Recovery you suggested. It appears that is a Symantec product. Yes? If so, I’m out. I don’t use Symantec products. Thanks much.