New to Acronis, need to image 100+ machines

Hey guys, I'm new to Acronis. I recently got this job and it was handed down to me, I believe they're using version 9. I've got 100+ machines to image in about a week and wondering what the best way to do this was.

The machines are all Dells, they do not have floppies and I don't have any blank CDs (but obviously I can buy some if I need to).

I guess my question is:

Can I make a backup of an image over the network and then restore that image almost in a ghostcast manner, where I use a PXE boot? I think that would be ideal.

What is the most efficient way of doing this?

 

Of course, I am assuming you windows licenses for all the machines you are re-imaging. That said, the answer is YES. Depending on your network speed, that will work, but reimaging 100 machines may be a big burden on the network.

I would create an rescue disk from TrueImage. Actually, make many. The rescue disk fits onto a CD. If you're bios supports bootable key drives, that would work also. The rescue media is too big for a floppy. Boot to the rescue media, and restore the drives. I have done it with a DVD image and across a windows network, and both work fine.

If the image you're going to restore would fit on a DVD then I would suggest using DVDs so you can restore multiple machines at the same time. Again, restoring 100 machines may jam up your network.

BUT (big but here), you need to be concerned with the SID (security identifier) of each machine. Since you use a common image, the SIDs will all be the same. They all need to be different to work on the same network or you'll get really strange behavior. There's a utility called NEWSID. google for it. It was put out by a company called sysinternals which was eaten by Microsoft a while ago, but you should be able to find a copy. Follow the instructions to set a unique SID for each machine.

 

Hello Cyprusg,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Could you please clarify what is the full version name of Acronis True Image you are using? You can find the full version name and build number by going to Help -> About... menu in the main program window.

Please note that according to Acronis License Policy you need to purchase one copy of the product for every computer it will be used to manage.

Thank you.
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Marat Setdikov