Macrium Site Manager

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Macrium Site Manager | Manage backup at scale

I’ll be posting screen shots regarding the Macrium Site manager software.  For many years I would use the Microsoft Essentials backup software (based on the Windows Home Server backup) but with Microsoft totally abandoning that product (as well as it breaking every time a feature release is installed) I’m migrating over to site manager.

Because I have SSDs.  Because I want to make sure I have the ability to recover from anything from ransomware to patches, I backup workstations and do a full image backup. My peoples like their icons just so.

(stay tuned, more to come)

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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wavy, bbearren

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So in setting up the site manager, if you use the agent deployment function, then the licenses for the network can be managed by the site manager console.

I selected all of the computers I wanted to backup. You can use active directory, or a group, or by netbios name or by IP address to build a definition of the backup.

 

 

 

 

Note that you could even backup to a cloud share:

Personally while the idea of having another storage space besides the local location is appealing (and I do have such a cloud storage) it’s not viable as a means to recover from because of the speed to pull it back down off the cloud.  I see cloud storage as “yet another paranoid backup” but not necessarily one that I will rely on to rebuild local stuff.

This next step took a bit of fine tuning.  I wanted to backup the main partitions but not if there was an external usb drive connected to a workstation.  So first I built exclusion rules for skipping drive letters and then I built a specific exclusion to skip any drive with the name of “WD Elements”  – that’s the name of the typical USB external drives that I may have temporarily have plugged into computers.

My final disks to back up rule set looks like that.  I want all system partitions. I want to exclude drive letters of the alphabet higher than G: and then I want to skip WD elements – that will exclude any usb connected hard drive I may have in a computer for a project.

I then set it up to alert me when computers are backed up and when they finish. Some of my computers have a C SSD drive and then a D IDE drive and you do see the speed drop on those IDE drives.

With the master console you can either choose to backup all systems to one location – or to manage external hard drives on each workstation.

 

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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