Backup regimen [was RE: 8 mm tapes]

[Rich Alderson]

From: Dave McGuire
Sent: Friday, September 24, 2010 6:44 AM

> My boss insisted on getting an 8500, though I wasn't convinced of the
> efficacy of the technology.  I wanted to just stick with our trusty
> QIC-150 and use a bunch of tapes for incremental backups.  He wanted
> full backups every time (I think he didn't really understand the
> incremental backup concept)

 [snip]

When I worked at Cisco, on the IT side of the house, we preferred doing
nightly full backups, rather than the industry-standard monthly-full/
weekly-incremental/daily-incremental I was used to.  Why?  Because it
took a *lot* less time doing a restore to a known point in time, which
meant that a system down had us out of business for a couple of hours at
most.  This was good enough on our MIPS boxes, and even better on our
HP-UX 9000/870 servers with three-way mirroring, where we could break
one volume out of the mirror and do backups from it, then merge it back
in.

I took the same backup regimen with me to XKL when I moved north, where
it saved a lot of engineering time following system crashes on the dev
boxen.


Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Server Engineer
Vulcan, Inc.
505 5th Avenue S, Suite 900
Seattle, WA 98104

mailto:RichA at vulcan.com
mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org

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