Offsite tape storage?

Wed Jul 16 10:22:06 PDT 2003

I just recalled (no pun intended) that when I was last employed, we used
Recall, out of San Jose.

They got bought by Brambles, I think -- a bigger company from Oz.

I had a certain amount of challenge getting things set up the way I
wanted, and there were occasional glitches, but overall, they were
OK to work with (from my limited experience directly dealing with
such folk).

What I had set up -- in case it helps any -- was that we would have
3 canisters; they were to be rotated rather as a juggler might:

* At any given moment, unless we actually requested the canister to
  do data recovery, at least one (usually two) canisters were in their
  storage.

* At any given moment, at least one (occasionally two) canisters would
  be at our place of business.

* Our "normal" backup schedule was "interrupted" on Sunday.  Normally,
  we used AMANDA, and set things up to let AMANDA schedule backups as
  appropriate -- but only Monday - Saturday.  On Sunday, I had AMANDA
  use a different configuration, one that did a full backup of
  everything, but did not record (in /etc/amandadates) that a backup had
  been done (so no incremental backup would be made based on this full
  backup).

* On Monday (or early Tuesday, if Monday was a holiday), I would put the
  newly-written tapes in the canister we had in-house at the time, and
  fill out the "transmittal form".  [This is a clerical task, and as long
  as someone you can trust who does it, it need not be done by
  someone with any special technical skills.]  The transmittal form
  specified that the canister was to return in 2 weeks.  (They always
  required that the date of return be specified.  Given how easily I get
  confused by dates & times anyway, this contributed to about half of
  the confusion and mistakes we saw.)

* Once per week, on Tuesday, their courier would select one of the
  canisters they had in storage (it would always be the one that had
  been there the longest, but they just went by canister number and
  the date that it was supposed to be returned), bring it to us,
  and pick up the new canister (for a 2-week "vacation" in the San Jose
  storage facility).

I never did have occasion to test their timliness for providing the
canister in the event of an emergency recall, so I cannot comment on
that.

I hope this helps.

Peace,
david
-- 
David H. Wolfskill				david at catwhisker.org
Based on what I have seen to date, the use of Microsoft products is not
consistent with reliability.  I recommend FreeBSD for reliable systems.