Hi George,
Thanks for your response.

Maybe I didnt explain myself to the level I intended to.
I understand that FOG is not a full blown backup tool with file level restore and so on (that is one of the reasons why we don´t want to use it as that).

What I do need is the “logic” FOG is offering. The machines we need to backup are industrial machines where we´re not allowed to change a single bit, so any Agent-based whatever backup solution is out of the game and we have to do Disk-Level backups and restores.
Also the main focus is not on “it´s free”, more on “it just works and not-IT guys are able to do what they need to do and not more”.

After all what I´d need is “just” a possibility to tell a machine that is already configured to boot from PXE, or more precisely to tell the PXE server “the next time this machine is asking you, you´ll tell it to directly boot image X instaed of entering the menu”, if that costs a reasonable amount of money, I´m fine with that.

If it is Linux based…well, I´d have to live with that

Regards,
LordBadHabit

Hey guys,

I´m new to FOG and I´m evaluating if it will be useful in my company.

My situation is as follows:

We do have a self-developed solution for automatically backing up and restoring mainly Windows-machines, based on WinPE, IPXE running on a WDS and Windows Powershell. Computers get a PXE Bootmenu and can select there if they want to backup or restore the device, then the equivalent WinPE is downloaded by HTTP/IPXE from the server and executed. All of this is based on a Windows Server where we also store the images.
For several reasons we don´t want to use the integrated imaging solution of FOG but to stick with a proprietary software that´s being executed within the PE.

Now, what I´d need is a way to somehow “marry” the management features of FOG with these existing tools if possible. Or maybe you´d have a recommendation how to do it without FOG (I´m more of a Windows guy :-)).

With “marry” I´m referring to a preferrably Web-based solution where users could mark a specific machine for backup, so it will be automatically imaged the next time it reboots. Currently they have to go there to reboot and select the backup option manually. So somehow this webinterface would need to edit the IPXE parameters in a way that during the next boot no longer the menu appears, but directly the “Backup-WinPE” is loaded on client side.

If that could be integrated with the “Inventory” feature of FOG, even better so I´d have name and MAC details already there.
Do you see away I could do that with FOG? Important to mention is that the guys marking the machines for backup are non-IT guys, so it should be fool-proof if you know what I mean

Any feedback or idea is very much appreciated.
Thanks in advance
LordBadHabit