I am in charge of maintaining around 25 PCs with various versions of Windows (Vista, 7, 8).
I was thinking something along the following lines:
- Every 4–6 months:
- Take an image of the system partition so that installed programs with their various license requirements can be restored easily if a hard disk fails. (I am thinking of Clonezilla for this.)
- Physically clean the machine, get rid of dust on the fans etc.
- Every 2 months:
- Do a software check on things like backups still running ok, anti-virus up to date, Windows updating itself, firewall set up correctly.
- Every day:
- Automatic backups of things like emails and documents.
What kind of schedule do you recommend?
What kind of software tools to use? Ideally I would like to automate as much of this as possible.
What other things should I be doing?
UPDATE:
Thanks for all the great answers so far, the advice to not do backups/images of individual machines doesn't really work in my case.
The licensing costs would be prohibitive, since there are at least 5 different software configurations for the different roles in the company -- finance, sales, management, production (3 types here alone) and having licenses for everyone for everything wouldn't make sense.
Also we have to keep some old versions of software for compatibility with some of our customers - the installation disks (with the license keys) have been lost or buried before my time.