New
#1
Advice for Simplifying Maintenance of Family PCs with Single Image
Warning - kind of long, but looking to set context/background before asking questions:
I am seeking advice from the good folks here on my strategy...pros/cons or specific hints or pointers that will assist making a go of it.
As my spouse is far from a sophisticated user, and seems to run into problems too often for my liking. My intent is to "enforce" a standard configuration we share. Any synchronization or backups have to run without needing her involvement.
I've purchased two identical models of laptops with this strategy in mind.
There are no licensing issues. Each laptop comes pre-installed with Windows 7 - each also has a unique unique Win 7 product key inside the battery compartment (discovered this by accident), and a recovery partition. And, outside of the OS, all our software is free, or for the two paid for, have a multi-install license.
My laptop will be the "Master" (no new config or install from my wife's will be propagated). I happen to have a couple devices that I can use to make an image/disk copy overnight, on a once a week cycle.
I have an extra hard drive I can use to "rotate" - not sure if this will make the imaging process "easier", but might be an effective "backup" if there is a problem with the image for some reason.
Advice?
I have a NAS to which I will backup using Acronis True Image, running nightly.
I also subscribe to Dropbox (free version), which we share. However, we don't want cloud to be our primary source for any files, as we are not always connected. Similar for our NAS, we just want to use it for backups, not a live source for active files.
Advice? Assuming the above setup so far makes sense, any flaws so far? The sticky points seem to be:
Windows Users:
I was thinking of configuring separate Standard User accounts for each of us (and possibly a third for our children who are getting old enough - configuring some form of Parental Control on those).
Advice? Not sure if I am over-complicating things doing this vs creating a Standard User account that we "share" (remember we are on separate laptops). But, it might make separation of data clearer.
Thunderbird:
We share some email accounts, but I have several more that I manage. Our main shared account is POP only. Rest are IMAP (so they would get synced automatically).
The biggest problem seems to be how to handle the POP account? While we share all emails that arrive to the inbox, any emails we send do not get propagated to our PCs. It is a long established account and are not about to change it very quickly.
Advice?
Other Apps Where Data/Files Are Created:
There are some files created from programs (e.g. Open Office, photo editors, scans) that we each generate. So while we can easily back them up, the question is how do we incorporate these into a single image process? I was thinking that I can configure each of these programs to use a "data" partition for user data. From there I could run a program that scans new files by date (since last image copy) and store them on on Dropbox or the NAS, then pulled by the Master prior to image copy (if not nightly).
Advice? Is this practical/simple? What tool would best facilitate this? Any other considerations?
Thanks!