[MACEP] Backup Management

[Mike Ely]

Darrin King wrote:
> 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.
> 

Darrin,

What kind of cost per gigabyte did your storage solution come to?  I'm 
looking at different options to replace our current (nonexistant) backup 
solution.

I have to second the idea of using quotas.  Currently, I've got a few 
users in the 2-5 Gig homedirectory range.  I'm not saying that's never 
neccessary, but in those cases it's probably useful to come up with 
alternative solutions.

Cheers,
Mike