[DCN-TechOps] Re: [DCN-Webteam] Advice on tape backup system

[Anne Hance]

Many thanks Jason for the thoughtful reply. This will be most helpful.
  I am forwarding responses on to Tom Wickersham at Explorit who is 
learning how to be their tech guru!

How are things with you? How is your family? All well I hope.
Anne

At 6:35 PM -0800 2/9/04, Jason Aller wrote:
>
>I've got a few questions that might help you get better suggestions.
>
>What is the rate of change in the data? Is it mostly fixed, with 10%
>changing in a year, or would it all potentially change during a month?
>
>How often do you want to backup? How much work is at risk if you backup
>once a week versus every night?
>
>Does this include financial data? Employee records? Are there legal
>concerns?
>
>Who within the organization can request a restore? How often will restores
>happen? Will they only be done in case of catastrophic failure?
>
>What OS is the server running?
>
>Do you want to use an offsite storeage facility, or will someone be
>responsible for taking the backups home?
>
>Without any of the answers I'm tempted at this point to suggest buying two
>20 gig external hard drives and who ever does backup brings one in and the
>working drive gets mirrored, and then that drive goes offsite and the
>other one comes on. It's not a foolproof system, and I'd suggest testing
>it once in a while to make sure that you can retrieve a file. It also
>suffers from not being able to go back more than two iterations at any
>given point. Again, this is without knowing any of the specifics, but
>would be a good place to start from.
>
>I've hung a lot of tape in my day and the one thing that I know is that
>one large nine track tape in more than enough to make a hammock out of,
>but that is a story for another time.
>
>--
>J.R. Aller -- jraller at dcn.davis.ca.us


-- 
-
Anne Hance <rahance at dcn.org> or
  <rahance at dcn.davis.ca.us>