Configuring Asset Management › File Collection

File Collection

Asset management lets you centrally manage system configuration files on your network. It can backup the configuration files on the managed assets and maintain various versions of the configuration files in the database. This helps you in pushing back to a previous version of the file.

Note: File Collection is available only for Windows agents.

You can configure the name and number of backup copies of configuration files, such as AUTOEXEC.BAT, CONFIG.SYS, WIN.INI, SYSTEM.INI, or NET.CFG. You can also define specific sets of backup files at the group level, so that you can accommodate the needs of different network groups and users without having to spend hours configuring backups on a user-by-user basis. Whenever the asset management agent runs, it checks whether the configuration file is modified. If yes, it updates the DSM Explorer with the previous and current file contents.

Configuring file collection at the computer level is more efficient than at the user level due to the following reasons:

• The agent uses the credentials of Local System Account for collecting the files. These user accounts have full access rights to all the files. Contrarily, if you configure it at the user level, the user's credentials are used to collect the files. If the user does not have permissions for accessing the file, the file collection fails.
• Configuring file collection at the user level is not of much use as the file system is maintained by the computer and copies of the file do not exist for each user.
• If you configure file collection at the user level, you will see multiple copies of the same file for each user. This can hit the database performance severely.

Note: You should be careful with regard to the number of configuration files and the maximum revisions you want to backup because these will have an impact on the database, and performance of the asset and the domain manager.

More information:

Access the File Collection Folder in the DSM Explorer