Protecting the workstations

Here is how to set up the most popular schedule: weekly full backup and daily incremental backup of users’ default document folders. In addition, we will retain only backups from the last 7 days.

  1. Create a policy that backs up [All Profiles Folder] to the managed vault on the storage node. This will back up the folder where user profiles are located (for example, C:\Documents and Settings in Windows XP). Choose the Custom backup scheme.
    1. Schedule full backup as follows: Weekly, Every 1 week on: Sunday, Execute the task once at 12:00:00 AM. Advanced settings: Wake-on-LAN: On. You may also want to distribute the backup start time within the time window to optimize the network usage and the storage node CPU load.
    2. Schedule incremental backup as follows: Weekly, Every 1 week on: Workdays, Execute the task once at 08:00:00 PM. Also set the advanced settings as required.
    3. Set up the retention rules as follows: Delete backups older than: 7 days. When deleting a backup that has dependencies: Consolidate the backups. Leave the default settings for the remaining retention rules. In Apply retention rules, set After backup.
  2. Create a dynamic group named, say, W_1. Specify %Windows%XP% and %Windows%Vista% as the criteria. This way, any workstation that will be registered on the management server later, will be added to this group and protected by the same policy.
  3. Apply the policy to the W_1 group. Make sure that the policy has been successfully deployed to each of the workstations. The policy deployment state has to change from Deploying to Deployed and its status has to be OK. To see the resulting backup plans on each of the workstations:
    1. navigate to the All machines group or the W_1 group
    2. select the workstation
    3. select the Backup plans and tasks tab on the Information pane.

    You can also see the resulting tasks, created on the workstations, in the Tasks view.

  4. Use the Dashboard or the Tasks view to track the daily activities related to the policy. Once you ascertain that all tasks run as specified, you can only check the policy status in the Backup policies view.

To protect data on a daily basis, you can also use the GFS or Tower of Hanoi backup schemes.

Protecting the workstations