OT: Tape less Backup System

[Bill Vermillion]

It was Sat, Jan 22 00:59  when Fairlight said "Mia kusenveturilo estas
plena da angiloj. And continued:

> At Fri, Jan 21, 2005 at 11:02:09PM -0500 or thereabouts, 
> suspect Bill Vermillion was observed uttering:

> > > In a corporate business environment, $1200 isn't much. In a
> > > small business or worse, personal environment, decent capacity
> > > and performance tape is still woefully overpriced, IMHO.

> > In personal it is expensive.  But in a small business it's just
> > like insurance.  And if you figure on only a 4 year life that's
> > only $1 day.  Being able to get a system up and running in
> > a matter of hours with all your data current through the previous
> > close of business is almost mandatory.  

> Just how often have -you- needed tape backups? 

I said for personal it was expensive, but in small business it's
just like insurance.  How often have you used your fire insurance.
For small businesses backups are like that - there if you need them
but you hope you never have to use them.

...

> > If you lose the data you'll never have to worry about
> > your accounts-payable as all the vendors will be more than happy to
> > send you bills - in the meantime you can't send any bills out.

> Quicken fits quite nicely on a CD, much less a DVD.  We use CDRW's.

And for a small business the time that take to make daily backups
can more than pay for a tape drive.  If you look at the wages paid
to an employee, figure in the taxes you pay, insurance, building
cost, etc, you will probably find that the overall cost of an
employee will never go below about $15.00/hour. [that is about a
low as you can get and it will typically be higher].

If you figure 1/2 hour day making a CDRW backup then you 
are at $37.50 per week employee cost.  50 weeks [with two weeks
that the replacement typically forgets to make the backup]
and you are at $1875.

I had one place that I checked on how backups were going - before
the 'net - and the new employee did NOT know to check for the daily
printout from backup edge and no one read root's mail.   They had
no good backups for 6 months.

A long time ago one place was making weekly backups every Thursday
night.  One person would stay for about 3 hours and backup to
28 8" floppy disks [ Tandy 16B ].

One time I went to do some work - and it was the weekend - and I
needed the master program disks.  The owner said he had them locked
in the bank for safe-keeping.  I pointed out that his insurance
would buy him new programs if they were destroyed - but the huge
box of backups on top of the computer had enough data that it could
take him about $10,000 to recreate manually. and still not get most
done.  It was only then he had two sets, and each week on would go
off sites and rotate.

The really good things about tape drives and programs such
as BackupEdge or LoneTar is that they never forget to make the
backups AND they will do a bit level verify to make sure the backup
is good - which is something I bet you don't do on your
CDRW.

It's just a business decision for anyone.  You have to decide if
you can take a chance and live without access to old data if you
lose it all, and if so can your business survive.

> > A good crash can take some companies out of business.  

> Crashes are never good.  :)

Losing your business because of a crash, or a fire, or theft of
computer, is also not good.

> As it is, since I got turned on to rsync, I've thought it's the
> next best thing since sliced bread. I love it. Except when I
> accidentally put a / on the end of something that I -didn't-
> want the / on. That's actually dangerous.

I use rsync to backup servers.  But I NEVER run it by hand. It's a
script that runs, and the system doesn't have enough AI capability
to rewrite the script to accidentally append an /

Always run scripts for backups and test them first.

> I'm thinking they should have made the behaviour a switch,
> not relied upon syntactical typing of your data source path.
> Of anything in rsync, that's -the- most likely thing to bite
> someone, IMHO.

Were you running with the delete option on?  I don't do that as
if a file gets removed accidentally and an rsync is run the copy
that was on the backup goes *poof*.

My mindset is that it's better to backup to much data than not
enough.

Bill

-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com