[MACEP] Backup Management

[Darrin King]

Hi Daisy,
We dumped our 20 some odd tape drives a couple of years ago in favor of an xServe/xServe RAID running retrospect centrally located at our office.  This immediately provided us with an off site back up of all of our building servers that we could
centrally manage.  The three biggest things we need to manage now are disk storage space, bandwidth and time.  Our WAN is 100 Mbit and even at that speed a complete rebuild of the all the backup catalogs takes close to a week.  That being the case
we monitor the size of each back up catalog (we have one for each server) and when one gets kinda big, we reset that one catalog.  I think we are doing that about once a week.

The other thing we need to manage is the amount of data users store in their accounts on the servers.  We now have a directory server account for every staff and student in our district.  As such we have implemented disk quotas in an effort to
contain the amount of "stuff" people store in there accounts.  Otherwise we figure people would be storing gobs files on the server which would in turn make our backup system choke.

Hope this helps,
Darrin A. King

DATABASE & EMAIL MANAGER

GBSD Tech Center
1444 SE 5th		                         
Gresham, OR 97080
Voice: (503) 465-0821
Fax:   (503) 456-2101
Darrin_King at gbsd.gresham.k12.or.us




Daisy Steele on Thursday, January 19, 2006 at 12:07 PM -0800 wrote:
>As we continue to become increasingly dependent on technology we are looking for ideas and  best practices and ideas to keep data backed up quickly, efficiently and reliably. Would you mind sharing your policies, procedures, tips/tricks, and
>hardware and software configurations? We are currently using multiple tape backups with Veritas Backup Exec but are looking into hard disk options as well as off-site network storage options. We currently have approximaely 20 servers housing the
>usual website, mail stores, files, and school database info. Any advice/ideas and online resources you are willing to share would be greatly appreciated. 
> 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.mesd.k12.or.us/pipermail/macep/attachments/20060120/a0f1fc2b/attachment.html