I used to be doing that, but this was a bit over a decade ago at this point. There was an SBC with DOS on a chip that connected to Novell Netware. I set a few variables in autoexec.bat, let it connect to the network drive, then had it run a script from there to admin them / do backups (by which I mean xcopy the C: drive).

These were for some industrial CNC machines with a poorly version-controlled app (send us the single-file .c for the program, we'll make changes & recompile for you, then send back a new .c and .exe file) that would just malloc() all the memory on the machine for a million element array instead of tracking the 1k or so unit IDs a more efficient way. They were six digits long, it worked... mostly.

I kept a 3.5 floppy with the contents of sys a: that I used to run sys c: after restoring a machine from backup in my office.

EDIT: oh, and of course by "restoring from backup" I mean reversing the xcopy to copy everything from the network drive's copy back to C:

EDIT2: My memory is going, they didn't use malloc() at all, anywhere in the programs, they just had a static million element array.