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creating a backup plan

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by fearchiefs 1 view

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I am an online college student and I need some help with an assignment. I was asked to develop a backup plan for a multi server system. The plan needs to include the servers and desktops and to develop a sequencing plan for the tapes. The assignment said I should search the internet for grandparent, parent, and child tape or media sequencing and I can't find anything. Can anyone either explain these to me or point me to a website that does. I am not wanting someone to do the work for me, but point me in the right direction. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

18 replies

by tony hopkinson

by Stress Junkie. A couple of points from my own experience.
Tapes have been known to fail, and you should always remember that dumping gigabytes to tape is a total waste of time if you can't restore it.
Both the backups and the scheme used should be verified.

by tony hopkinson

They did an annual full backup (system and data) policy. Puts everything including VMS, configuration the lot, from a loss of hard/drive / machine. To restore it you need a stand alone backup tape. Four years of backing up, took 8 hours per machine. Not one boot tape !. Would have had to install vms, do a stand alone backup tape, the boot off that, then do the full restore.

I've also had a tape fail, drive chewed it up. Trying to recover from partial backups even if your modification log is sound is a major pain in the ass.

I''ve lost count of the places I've been to where they consier the risk of doing a restore to prove the backup, greater than that of needing a backup and it not restoring correctly.

by deep6mail

Can you recommend any good reading on developing a DR solution and where I can find a good glossary of terms. I have been tasked with creating a DR plan for my company and I am not sure where to start.

by ahmedparvez

Do search the net better.Wikipedia and ACM Queue will be places where you will find pointers.If you still want to dig deeper see www.2600.com and yes before asking questions refer to ESR's How to ask questions the smart way.

Hope it helps.

bye

Parvez

by stress junkie

I hear you. My last real job (where I was a direct employee) wouldn't do a fire drill for disaster recovery. The IT manager figured that we would all just know what to do when to do it etc. Naturally if we ever DID have to do a disaster recovery we would all be standing around asking "Who's going to call Iron Mountain?", and "Where are the boot/installation media for the servers?", and everything else. We didn't have any AXP console disks in Iron Mountain storage. It was all in the offices. The people running the NT servers didn't even have any backups at Iron Mountain; they were all on site. Only VMS and Solaris backups were at Iron Mountain.

AND THIS WAS A MUTUAL FUND COMPANY!!!

You just have to wonder how some people become department managers. I fought for all of these things to be fixed during the three years that I was there. The only outcome was that I became very much a persona non gratis. The other ten system administrators thought I was a lunatic for wanting to get all data stored off site, have software installation disks stored off site, and to perform partial fire drills once a month. In the end we were all laid off due to a merger. I was the only system administrator that DIDN'T get a profit sharing bonus before being laid off. That one bonus would have been about $8,000. I guess you have to go along to get along. Or, to put it another way, people are a$$holes.

It makes me angry. But, as I always say, I'm not bitter. No sir. Not me.

Regarding VMS, I say that it is the only enterprise class operating system that I ever regarded as being of high enough quality to actually use to run a business. I'm not really all that fond of Unix, hate MS, don't know about Tandem or other niche systems. VMS is/was a damned good system.

by tony hopkinson

Did six years as admin/developer, went away the came back six years later and did another two years development on contract. Getting a tad long in the tooth, I'll admit, very effective bite radius though, bit like me really.
The systems I worked on were running the entire manufacturing/mis effort for 15 steel palnts and ancilliaries.

by m_a_r_k

What kind of class are you taking, fearchief? It's been my experience with school assignments that the teacher never gives an assignment without at least a few hints on how to get it done. Either from the textbook, other reading material or lectures. You'd learn learn a lot more by stretching your brain, doing some research on your own and maybe talking to your classmates about it, instead of asking us for help. I know you just want hints from us (so you say, anyway) but do yourself a favor in preparation for when you graduate and do the work yourself. Next thing you'll be asking is for us to pay your tuition for you. ?:|

Students nowadays have it too easy. We didn't have anything called an Internet when I got my first college degree. Actually, I think it's a good thing. Students learn a lot more and a lot faster with all this information so readily available. It's especially readily available when there are willing benefactors like stress_junkie around... :|

by stress junkie

I know I ended up doing the assignment. If he took a description of the media rotation from a web page and inserted that into my post that would be the whole paper. I got carried away with adding "one more thing" several times.

I don't regret it though. I understand your position that it is good for students, and anyone, to stretch their imagination solving problems. On the other hand most of my success is due to the kindness of strangers helping me with different situations in a work environment. I have found that a career in IT is greatly enhanced when people help each other. So, to some degree, providing the answer to someone is very close to real life.

In the end you are correct. I did give the entire answer. Maybe I shouldn't have done that.

by texhead

With so much information available it is becoming more a case of knowing what to retain and what to file away and index. It also depends on what function or position you hold as to what you retain.

by pksccd64

Mark,

I hope you're still around to get this (though it wouldn't surprise me if with YOUR attitude someone hasn't removed you from the planet). I mean, what a *$%@* JERK! A Student asks someone to point them in the right direction (Which I'm sure you've NEVER asked for help in your life!) and you have to respond to the helper -give me a break.
It's people like you who are "let everyone figure it out on their own, they'll be better for it" mentality that's polluting society now and making it a vertible "TRASH-HEAP" of worthless warm bodies. Help someone or SHUT-UP !!!!

by tony hopkinson

Critical , high profile, potentially massive, give it to some poor twat who knows nothing about it, then if you don't like the answer ignore them. If you're a small to medium I'll send you my tee-shirt as a reward when you are done.

How long could we do business without this.
How much would it cost
How long would it take to get another one.
How likely is that I may have to do without (only this ) this.
What's the full cost of implementing the replacement.

It's alot of fun, the report I was given to blow holes in said.

If the computer room burnt down we could replace all the computers with the current software in a day.

I said if the computer room burnt down, it would take us two weeks to rewire as the cables are all end labelled and we don't have an up to date drawing anyway.

I don't what your business is, but if there are plans to switch over to a paper system to keep going during an IT outage, get the interfaces right. Lost power for three hours once, they shifted to manual, took us 8 months and 15 customer complaints to get the system up to date with what went off while it was in hibernation.

People always forget that one.
DR is not just IT, by the way. Don't forget the people.
Who's your admin ? Tony.
Who's his backup? Backup ?.

by thefrown

You may find that searching on grandfather+father+son yields more information, as that's what it used to be called before the days of political correctness. If you want to be flash also try the "Tower of Hanoi" (a much better system)

You can also try media rotation

by ogm_c_ville_tc

I have the same assignment and I too am an online college student. Possibly the same school? Just seems weird the I google sequencing of tapes and get a link to this page. Oh well I am done with my two cents. Good luck on the assignment.

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