Thoughts On Restore Software

[Mitech]

Background on my situation, I'm doing IT for a community center, I'm doing this to get credits for my graduation, so this is essentially my first IT gig.

The director has tasked me with finding restore software for the public PC's, and a backup/restore software for personnel PC's.

For the public PCs I found a few options:

Deep Freeze
Reboot Restore Rx
Drive Vaccine
Toolwiz Time Freeze

For the Personnel PC's I found:

RollBack Rx
AX64

I know we could image, but that's what we do now and it's time consuming, and while I'm providing IT support, I won't be there all the time, so we need something that's easy for volunteers to use.

In my testing, and getting quotes for the paid products, RollBack Rx and Drive Vaccine seem to be the front runners in terms of price and performance; but I essentially am looking for thoughts from the community. Is there a solution I'm missing? Thoughts on the ones I've looked into so far?

 

[Ralston18]

Not sure that I correctly follow your premise with respect to "restore software for the Public PC's" and "backup/restore software for the personnel PC's".

Seems to me that you could just use one backup/restore application but not use the "backup" component for the public PC's.

Which would then narrow down the present choices to Rollback RX or AX64.

Then based on "front runners" that leads to Rollback RX.

Might help with the pricing if you are able to purchase even more copies/licenses of only one product.

 

[Alabalcho]

If by "Public PC" you mean a PC which will have to be restored to some default settings once in a while (eg once per week), some solution based on WDS (Windows Distribution Service) would do - you boot over the network, select the image you want to restore, and in couple of minutes / half an hour / half a day you have the PC in a pristine state. Similar procedure could be used for "Personal PCs", where backup is performed into an image which could then be restored.

Have a look at Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Essentials R2 (I know, long name)... YOu can download it for trial period, set in on an ordinary PC with modest resources, make an isolated environment for it, and attach couple of PCs to play with (if you are really smart, you can do all this on a single PC with virtualizing software, such as VirtualBox, Hyper-V etc).

 

[LukeFatwalker]

If you don't mind spending a bit more, Rollback Rx on all machines will do the trick. If you want to keep costs down, go with just Drive Vaccine or Reboot Restore on the public access PC's. Typically speaking I try to keep as many software solutions under the same umbrella as humanly possible but that's just me.