Software for backups

Thu Oct 23 22:37:59 PDT 2003

hi ya chuck

On Thu, 23 Oct 2003, Chuck Yerkes wrote:

> Quoting Alvin Oga (alvin at Mail.Linux-Consulting.com):

> 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.

people will always be hired and leaving  a company ...

it's up to the company's management to figure out how to make
smooth transisitions between the onez that left for whatever
reason and new ones coming in

> 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.

good :-)

> > 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.

depends on the admin

> Hell, it's a fantasy on Linux (where 50% of files have no
> man page).

depnds on the admin and the man pages doesnt necessarily
tell you which apps creates what files, where, how, when
and which packages those files came from
	- you should have a 99% hit rate for which package
	created what files

> > 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.

depends how you do your backups or manage it
	- it doesn't mean i have to spend the same time as oyu 
	do to get the same functionality, reliability, performance

> I don't spend 1/10th of a second per email running the servers.

some emails takes seconds/minutes .. hours of checking in the background
for the answers to the emails

very very few people can hit the "delete" key in under 0.25 seconds
of seeing the email :-)

> And it's moe likely that the machine is off or away.

makes it hard to backup if the machines is off or away
and they dont know whe you are gonna be backing it up

and if its traveling, its very likely to get dropped or stelen
and come back to the corp office and say, gee, i hope you guys
backed it up last night ( when lots of people take those laptops home )
	- another separate emails of the merits of laptops or not

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

nope... you said 100 laptops at 60GB each ... 

amd i said, you will have a hard time backing up those 100 laptops
unless you start applying some backup methodology and rules
where your backups are to last 1-2 years 

> Well, er, duh.  You never have backups since the last backup.
> The sky is blue.

its amazing what people will want to restore from backups
because of a boo-boo or their booboo or somebody's or 
a process/proceedures booboo

> /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.

good have fun playing with tapes...

personally... i wouldn't have done it that way ... 

and when was the last time you checked these tapes...
	and restored a machine/user to a particular day from
	bare metal disks or systems

> > data loss is not acceptable under any condition... 
> 
> That's entirely not true.

data that didn't matter if its lost should not occupy backup 
space for more than a week or a month or a quarter or a year

>  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).

humm ... vice versa too ... but those comments are irrelevant

> You don't spend $10k to salvage data that you can reproduce
> for $5k.

i'm not the one over spending the "backup budgets" in my book
and whomever spends $10K to restore/salvage the data that
can be reproduced should be shown the door

> > - 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.

you get what you pay for .... or they get away with minimal work
and gone home by 5pm .. ( just depends on the company and workers )

some folks work inexpensively compared to others ..

others collect huge fees/salaries/bonusess that a $10/hr techie 
can do better...  and vice versa

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

for $60K ... any admin will take that job to baby site 4 machines..
	-- geez .... even at microsoft itself, but that's not for me ... 

c ya
alvin