[BBLISA] Backup Windows systems to samba?

[Edward Ned Harvey (bblisa4)]

> From: Ben Eisenbraun [mailto:bene at klatsch.org]
> 
> Treat the Windows machines like you do your Linux and Mac machines and
> only back up the user data. Configure and deploy the OS and applications
> using your config management system + Chocolatey.

This is very unreasonable advice.  For example:  I am a software developer and an IT guy, and I also support other software developers.  I'm going to talk a moment about my environment on windows.

#1 Installing windows and then updates is an all-day process.  Just for windows.
#2 I am personally good at keeping track of things like Adobe licenses, but I've taken many jobs in many situations, where I needed to help someone reformat their system, and they couldn't find their MS Office, Adobe, Matlab, or Autocad installation media or license keys.
#3 There's a lot of stuff that's difficult to automate and not worth the effort of automation - printer driver, wifi password, domain joining, power options, folder view preferences
#4  Once I get through all that - I'm up to about 2 days of work - The fun can begin with installing Visual Studio, and all of the extensions and updates and development libraries.  Cygwin will take another couple of hours.  And that's if I can remember which packages I cared about.

You can act like this is all simple in linux, but it's not.  I've supported developers who were using Eclipse with various software libraries installed, and when needing to reinstall at a later date, they of course couldn't get the versions they formerly used, and had to struggle with all the new versions of eclipse and the associated libraries, etc.

Macs are pretty good, thanks to time machine.


> I've never actually done it on Windows, so YMMV but in theory it's doable.

Yes.  Evidently.   ;-)