I've just asked Ops for a restore of some files last known to have been backed up on 2005-12-22. From a D drive that no longer exists - it's E now, for some reason known only to some other dept. Ops know they have a username, coz they take the backups, but they're not sure of the pw...
I ought to back up the home machines, really. Nothing desperate on them, but it'd be tedious to lose it anyway.
They only keep the tapes a month. Oops. Further, the backups have been failing since we rebuilt the thing (not that there's owt on it anyway anymore, that I couldn't rebuild in a couple of hours)
That is a little scary - at the least you should have yearly backups. I've been asked to recover stuff from our yearly backups made three years ago before now!
Years ago when I ran the backup system we did incrementals every night, a full every week, and kept last week's last month's last quarter's and last year's. But then we only had approx 100 relatively small Novell servers. Now there's a shedload of BFO boxes of all kinds of OSs, and they reckon they just don't have the tapes or the psace to store them. I blame the management.
Bonus points for backing up; massive number of negative points for deleting the backup as hard drives know when you do this and will fail in fairly short order.
Its also not a very good backup if you're relying on another spinning hard drive to store the data! Well, not unless its actually a gaggle of disks at a suitable RAID level (eg a StorEdge 3511FC).
My backups are currently on external hard disks (although I do send the occaisonal CD of photo raws to assistants in another town). One is physically disconnected when not in use, the other is a bit more awkward to get at and I've not yet got into the habit of disconnecting it (so it's only unmounted when not in use). Ought to.
It would be nice to have a less complex mechanism in the backup medium, but it's hard to see what other than hard disks can produce a comparably good capacity:price ratio (at least at the kind of prices I'm prepared to pay).
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-02 12:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-02 12:48 pm (UTC)I ought to back up the home machines, really. Nothing desperate on them, but it'd be tedious to lose it anyway.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-02 04:00 pm (UTC)Oops.
Further, the backups have been failing since we rebuilt the thing (not that there's owt on it anyway anymore, that I couldn't rebuild in a couple of hours)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-03 01:41 am (UTC)That is a little scary - at the least you should have yearly backups. I've been asked to recover stuff from our yearly backups made three years ago before now!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-03 11:12 am (UTC)Now there's a shedload of BFO boxes of all kinds of OSs, and they reckon they just don't have the tapes or the psace to store them.
I blame the management.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-03 01:40 am (UTC)Its also not a very good backup if you're relying on another spinning hard drive to store the data! Well, not unless its actually a gaggle of disks at a suitable RAID level (eg a StorEdge 3511FC).
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-03 11:49 am (UTC)My backups are currently on external hard disks (although I do send the occaisonal CD of photo raws to assistants in another town). One is physically disconnected when not in use, the other is a bit more awkward to get at and I've not yet got into the habit of disconnecting it (so it's only unmounted when not in use). Ought to.
It would be nice to have a less complex mechanism in the backup medium, but it's hard to see what other than hard disks can produce a comparably good capacity:price ratio (at least at the kind of prices I'm prepared to pay).