Windows XP Remote Command Line Backup

I had the need today to connect out to a PC and run a backup on it.  Turns out this is trivial to do even with the standard windows NTBackup program.  From another machine logged in with admin rights to the target machine run the following command:

c:>ntbackup backup \\remotePCnamehere\c$ /j “PC backup name here” /f “c:\backup.bkf”

This will backup the C: drive on the pc named remotePCnamehere locally to your C: in a file called backup.bkf on the box running the command.  I can’t believe I haven’t had need for this more often. 

Enjoy!

Want

Big honkin server

Data Destruction Fun

We often have the need to destroy data on old equipment including hard drives, floppy drives, backup tapes, CD’s, etc.  This has always been painful for me because we used to rely on our recycling vendor to assure us that data was being disposed of properly...and I don’t trust anyone. :)  For hard drives I like Darik’s Boot-n-Nuke, but it’s a pain to use on loads of removable media.  So I went out and bought an Erase-o-Matic 3. How cool is this thing?!  No power required because it uses rare earth magnets to suck the data life right out of the media.  It literally takes seconds to wipe disks.  So far I am very happy with this device in it’s simplicity, effectiveness and cost.  A similar electron magnet eraser was almost $10K!  I haven’t had a chance to fully test this thing yet on all media types but so far so good!

Enjoy the destructive goodness!!!