Restoring an image over a wireless network

It's an impractical way to restore an image owing to slow transfer speed with wireless. I know. But is anyone doing it with Acronis True Image? A few people in other forums have expressed interest owing to inability to run cables in their homes.

 

Brian,

Are you wanting to do it from the TI CD (Full Mode version) or when booted into another Windows partition/BartPE/VistaPE?

One of the problems is the lack of good WiFi support in Linux.

 

MudCrab,

From a boot CD, as if you were restoring the image to an empty HD. I don't intend to try. I was just curious to see if it could be done in the TI Linux environment. I read a post suggesting it could (possibly) be done from TI or a Linux version of Ghost.

 

Brian:

The TI recovery environment does not include wireless drivers, so this isn't going to work by itself. You could copy the target image across the network to a different partition on the hard drive and then restore, or you can try BartPE or VistaPE, like MudCrab suggested.

I tried getting wireless working in VistaPE and found that if you include your wireless card driver it does work (see the last few posts in that reference), but VistaPE did not support encryption about a year ago, so you would need to turn off encryption on the wireless network. However, with wireless throughput at about 22 Mb/s = 2.75 MB/s = 0.165 GB/min you won't be breaking any speed records. This is a factor of 6 - 10 times slower than restoring via an external USB disk.

Isn't it easier to carry a USB hard disk from one room to another in the house?

 

You also need rock solid signal to reliably copy multi-gigabyte files over wireless and this has nothing to do with TI.

 

k0lo,

Sure. That's what I'd do. I'm just collecting information.

Thanks for that thread. It answers my question.

 

We all agree that it's not the ideal way to restore an image but I've been playing with a technique to restore an OS image (stored on a remote computer) over a wireless network that should work with any brand of image/restore software. It won't work if there is a HD failure but almost all of my restores fall outside that category.

Create a dual boot. WinXP for example can be installed to a 2 GB partition. Install your imaging app to the new WinXP. Set up your wireless networking and mapped network drive. Now you can simply restore an image to your main Windows partition. It's not the system partition so this can be done from Windows.