Quote:
Originally Posted by badgoodDeb
Nope, not excessive at all. (Note: my job is backup!) I'm fretting about re-using tapes that are >3 years old, even though I've saved quarterly tapes from that same bunch. I'm just re-using the months in between the quarter-saves. And fretting about doing so, even though we don't PROMISE that much history, and even though I have the quarterly tapes! And even though the data is presumably still present on the tapes I'm saving TODAY. How many people want a file that was deleted 4 years ago, and didn't exist long enough to be on a quarterly tape??
But I like to keep lots of backups!
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I was the backup admin in a previous job. We used NetBackup, and a nightly job dumped to tape. One issue we ran into was that we couldn't
do full backups, because the time window wasn't long enough. We had to do incrementals.
An annoyance for me was that I'd always get a call "Oops! I accidentally deleted file X from directory Y. Can you restore it from backup?" just
after the nightly tapes had been handed over to the driver from the offsite back storage provider. I worked around that for a while by simply holding the tapes a day before handing them over. But the outside auditors came through, and my boss told me we had no choice and had to send the tapes off next morning, and never mind the inconvenience for the users. (My boss was a nice guy, but not inclined to argue with higher, even when he arguably should have.)
NetBackup could backup to disk, and backup that to tape, which was what I wanted to do. My boss agreed, but we didn't have the server assets to do it at that point.
In an earlier iteration, I was doing backups of a local Unix server, and dreaded restore requests. The first question was what we called the job on the system, since I was searching for named files. What would the file names be? Another was that almost guaranteed, the cassette tapes we used would be flaky for the restore we wanted, and the backup software was less than optimal. (IIRC, it was a find to generate the list to be backed up, piped to cpio to generate an archive to dump to tape.) I inherited the setup, and had to deal with it.
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Dennis