[Frank Stearns]

Les Cargill writes:

snips

At some point, you begin to think about a NAS appliance. I do at least.

I've got a pseudo NAS system. The security machine that monitors and records-on-
motion the security cams also has a big data drive hanging off of it and is on the
LAN. It's physically located in a protected space. Synctoy is used to periodically
update its images of the partitions of the two main working machines (office and
DAW) stored on that security machine's data drive.

While intended for crash recovery (which has never happened, knock on wood; I
pre-emptively replace system drives and some data drives every 12-18 months using
the cloner), it did work well when I upgraded a system where using the cloner wasn't
practical (spinner to SSD). I did a final update from the retiring system to the
partition images on the fake NAS, then brought the new system online.

I did the basic config on the new system, partitioned following my standard, then
used Synctoy to image the data back from the fake NAS drive to each empty partition.
Everything then took right off on the new system. Seamless, painless.

(The first and last time I tried a commercial migration program it was a complete
and utter disaster. Wound up having to completely reinstall the OS on the target
machine and start over by hand. Oy. Microsoft had some sort of migration utility
built in, IIRC, but in previewing what it was going to do I cancelled immediately.
Another huge mess in the making.)

YMMV.

Frank
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