Why does nobody talk about the shift from physical drives to cloud images?

Back around 2015, I'd spend hours making a perfect Windows install on a master hard drive, then clone it to a stack of others for shop repairs. It was a whole afternoon job for maybe 10 machines. Now, I just keep a clean Windows 11 image on a network share and push it out with a PXE boot setup. The switch happened for me about two years ago when we got a batch of 20 identical laptops from a local school district. Doing them the old way would have taken two days, but with the network image, we were done in under four hours. It's way faster and you can update the master image once instead of redoing the whole process. Has anyone else moved to network imaging, and what tool do you use for it?

3 comments

3 Comments

thomas.mark1mo ago

See it everywhere, like how nobody buys movies on disc anymore. The cloud just makes things easier to copy and forget.

kevin_harris7829d agoProlific Poster

Actually thought that was just how things were going... but seeing a real use case like that makes it click. The cloud's fine for some stuff, but having your own setup for certain jobs just works better. Guess it depends on what you're trying to do.

brown.emery1mo ago

Try setting up a PXE server on an old desktop you have lying around. It sounds harder than it is, and the time you save on the first batch of machines pays for the setup. We use Fog Project because it's free and just works for our shop.