John,

I would think that the best way to do this is to choose a single
machine from which you will backup this software and backup up
that whole system. Then on your other machines, make an exclude
list that includes all of the program files that do not need to
be backed up.

One of the gotchas is if your software installations aren't
standard, you might have to customize a *lot* of exclude lists.
You'll also want to make sure you do backup .ini type files that
will differ machine-to-machine.

 -- Tom

"If I could dot the 'i' in a Michigan     Thomas A. La Porte
 game and the good lord came to take me   Archivist, Feature Animation
 the next day ... at least I could        DreamWorks SKG
 die happy." - Beano Cook, ESPN           <tlaporte AT anim.dreamworks DOT com>

On Wed, 26 Mar 1997, John Dawson wrote:

>How does ADSM handle the situation where you have copies of a given set
>of files on many machines in the network?  For example, say you've
>deployed MS Office across 2000 desktop machines.  What's the best way
>to make sure you don't waste time doing 1999 backup operations, chewing
>up your network and server storage area for no good reason?
>
>--
>John Dawson // Internet: jdawson AT tkg DOT com // The Kernel Group, Inc.
>