Quote:
Originally Posted by poohbear_nc
Sadly ... most of them ... the latest was a request to 'resurrect' an order placed in 2002 .....  |
I went through that. I was sysadmin and other things at a market research firm, and I'd get requests to resurrect jobs. We worked on a project basis, and the requests were generally because a client was coming back for another round and the boss wanted to see what we did last time.
"What was the job?"
"Well, the client was..."
"I don't know from clients. I have only the vaguest notion of who we are working for on what. What did we call the job on the system, and when was it done? What files am I looking for in what time period?"
And resurrecting the job meant finding the right backup tape and restoring it from backup, once I knew what to look for. I learned to loathe cpio and the backup tapes used because of the failure rate.
In a later period at the same employer, we used NetBackup and I was the NetBackup admin. There was a tape jukebox in the server room NetBackup backed up to, and tapes were sent offsite to a storage facility each day.
Guaranteed, a luser would tell me that "Oops! They just accidentally deleted an important file, and could I get it back from backup?" just
after I'd handed the tapes over to the courier from the offsite storage facility. "I just sent the tapes offsite. I won't be able to get them back and do the restore for you till tomorrow. Sorry..."
I got around the problem for a while by deliberately holding the tapes a day before sending them offsite, but then the auditors came through, and I got told that no, I couldn't hold the tapes a day. They had to go offsite every morning after the nightly backup.
NetBackup could backup to disk, and then from disk to tape. Doing so would have been a vast improvement because I could send the tapes offsite as required, but still be able to catch the oops moments by restoring the copy on disk. My boss agreed it was desirable, but didn't have a server with adequate disk space to implement it and wouldn't be getting it in any near term time frame. Available budget was committed elsewhere.
A chunk of what I did as sysadmin was setting things up to make it less likely lusers
could shoot themselves in the foot like that. I was only partially successful.
______
Dennis