scott wrote:
>> What do you use to back up data? I'm not talking about permanent 
>> archival, I'm talking about rolling backups so that if a small 
>> meteorite hits your server room, you don't loose all the data you're 
>> working on.
> 
> Our backups are usually used when someone accidentally deletes a file 
> (or a lot of files!) from the server...

Well, yeah, that's what you end up actually *using* the system for. ;-)

[Or maybe just because Word crashed and ate your document, and you don't 
want to start from scratch again.]

> AFAIK over at IT they use a tape backup system - it runs every night on 
> a rolling basis, I think at the moment you can get a backup from the 
> last 7 or 10 days, after that they start overwriting.  On top of that 
> weekly ones are kept and stored separately (so I assume that allows you 
> to get back 7 or 10 weeks).  It's pretty complex and I don't know much 
> about the details

Nah. Sounds like exactly what we have here.

> but I do know that a while back they had to make 
> some changes because there wasn't enough time overnight to do the backup 
> :-)

Well, that's why we only back up "changed" files nightly, and do a full 
backup at the weekends only. It used to be touch and go whether it would 
complete by Monday - but since I installed higher capacity drives, it 
seems to back up very much faster.

No, the limitation I'm running into now is space, not time.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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