As many of us know, backups are not archives. Backups are for disaster recovery, archives are to preserve specific data for a specific period of time (perhaps "forever").
In reviewing (and revising to be significanly shorter) our backup retention policy, I became aware that our users have (at least in their mind) been relying on our backups to serve as archives (long term storage). Before I present the new backup retention policy, I would like to know about options for data archiving. I am not even sure how to describe the service, so google searches are not very helpful yet (mostly I found tools for digitial archives of records that are not originally digital). I asked others on campus, and no one seems to have an answer -- but they all agreed it is something we need. Do any of you have or know of any systems for data archiving? >From a user point of view, they would specify a collection of files/directories (most likely an entire project area in the file sytems) and ask that it be archived under some naming scheme, for a specific period of time (at which point notification is sent to do something -- extend the archive expiration date or delete the archive, I don't know). >From a technical point of view... I don't know what the requirements are. Obviously, we want to preserve the data. I am sure others have already come up with requirements and solutions to avoid, detect and hopefully correct bit rot... So.. what is out there, what is the conventional name for such a service or product, is anyone using it? thanks, --david David Parter Director of Academic Computing Facilities University of Wisconsin Computer Sciences Department [email protected] 608-262-0608 _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
