Software for backups

Thu Oct 23 18:03:47 PDT 2003

Quoting Alvin Oga (alvin at Mail.Linux-Consulting.com):
> 
> hi ya chuck
> 
> On Thu, 23 Oct 2003, Chuck Yerkes wrote:
> > And have job security forever....
> i rather spend my 8-10-16 hr days developing new code to do foo-bar stuff
> and not play/worry/wonder with people's backups ...
> ( and nobody else needs to play/worry/wonder either cause it works )
And it's a danger to my business and irresponsible of me to
hire people who build a one-off system that cannot survive
key staff members leaving and where I cannot hire replacements
to walk in and be effective quickly.

> > When you leave it to the users, you don't know that re: shared folders.
> yup... you dont know what they did to their machine either...
> if they installed their favorite games and friends virus

I do know what we support however.  We support the machine you built.
We mandate virus checking and patches and run that for you.
If you install your favorite games on a company machine and it 
infects the company's servers, we WILL walk you to the door.
Game over.

> 	- 1 unix admin can handle 20, 50, 100, 500 users.. no problem
Depends, yes.

Hardly true for Windows.

> 	- windoze admin asnwer peoples questions about 
> 		- how come it doesnt print today
> 		- how come emails dont go out or come in today

Right, cause those same folks when I had unix on their desks
never had those questions or problems.

> > > - all user installed/downloaded files belong in 
> > >  my-documents/download or something so you can go find it
> > Except when an app puts them elsewhere.
> 
> you as the admin, better know where every file is put and
> what created it
This *is* of course a fantasy in the windows world.
Hell, it's a fantasy on Linux (where 50% of files have no
man page).

> if you spend more than a couple minutes per backup per
> machine ... something is seriously wrong
> 	-- enough knocking your head into the wall will
> 	oneday bring some light to the subject .. ??

Your metrics are off. I don't spend 1/10th of a second per email
running the servers.  I spend my time to fireup the engine, get
a head of steam and start running.

> if you dont want users to do their "save their important files",
> than the system will do it for them ..
> 	- do it at night when its less likely for them
> 	to hit the power switch while you were at lunch or meetings
And it's moe likely that the machine is off or away.

> > Find me the tape that has sharon's data before last week and has
> > this file on it.
> 
> or from a year ago .... no problem .... i keep data for at least
> 6mon to a year... and can restore to any particular day

COol, but you just said you were doing it for 100 60GB laptops.
Now we're up to several hundred terrabytes.

> > 5 notes messages/day I get.  The rest of my work is on a real machine.
> > Every couple days, I open the laptop and a window says: "You've missed
> > a scheduled backup, trying in [5] minutes" unless you hit cancel.
> 
> that's dumb and stupid and worthless
> 	- if that machine died, you dont have backups of that machine
> 	since its last successful backup
Well, er, duh.  You never have backups since the last backup.
The sky is blue.

> > The disk whirs and the machine slows to a crawl and then it stops
> > doing that.  ANd my data is backed up I assume (and since I work
> > with the folks who drive 12 tape robots around, I actually KNOW its
> > backed up).
> 
> i wouldnt trust a bunch of tapes even if you gave me $100K to use
>  	( separate issue )

/me just came down from a room with roughly 15,000 tapes, all barcoded
and cataloged.  That's just the onsite storage.  For this campus.
Welcome to the professional leagues.

> data loss is not acceptable under any condition... 

That's entirely not true.  Business cases are clear.  You emit
these odd little truisms that seem to sit in your view of your
reality at the moment (and change throughout your missives).
You don't spend $10k to salvage data that you can reproduce
for $5k.

> - how often you do daily/hourly/per-transaction backups
>   is a separate issue

And when I can spent $30k and have a $35k/year person handle restores,
that costs me a lot less than hiring someone for $70k/year to work
scripts.  This is just the basics.

I replaced crash carts of guys gathering 8mm tapes locally attached
to servers and put in a secondary ethernet infrastructure (~$100k)
to backup to a $100,000, 5 drive tape robot.   Put the guys to work
doing other stuff and I get return on my investment in 2 years.
Savings for not dealing with tapes with scrawled pen noting date/machine/level
and instead using a barcode that keys to a database?  enormous.
Savings for not having wait 3 days while they figure out that they
overrote that tape?  Measurably Huge.

> 
> c ya
> alvin
> 
> short answer for david's original questions...
> 	- get amanda for windoze to send its data to the backup
> 	server ... and let the 3 or 5 backup machines figure it
> 	all out and replicate, encrypt and protect itself  ( backups )

And hire a $60,000 of system admin to run those 4 machines and the scripts.
Pay that $60k every year.