> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Backup policies
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Mark Giuffrida)
> Date: Fri, 29 Oct 93 17:42:49 -0400
> Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> At the "umich.edu" cell, we are interested in how other folks have offered
> backup service to their user community. This is our situation:
>
> - weekly full backups
> - daily incrementals
>
> We save a copy of the fulls permanently every 4 months and start over on the bu
> database. We offer to restore volumes for users that request it. The request
> is answered within 24 hours (the actual restore itself within 48 hours). We
> offer this service to our user community even though our primary goal of
> backup is disaster recovery.
>
> I'm really curious if other administrators have faster turn around policy for
> user restore requests, if they charge for them, if they don't provide them, etc.
> We are in the middle of doing a reality check to see if what we are offering is
> reasonable.
>
> Mark Giuffrida
> Univ of Michigan, ITD
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
The Advanced Laboratory Workstation Project (ALW) at the National Institutes
of Health (alw.nih.gov) uses a somewhat more complex backup schedule. We divide
volumes into four categories:
1. Daily Incremental/Weekly Full -- user home volumes
user data volumes
software source volumes
2. Weekly Incremental/Monthly Full -- most system volumes
some data volumes
3. Monthly Full -- large (gigabytes), stable databases
4. No backup -- log areas, temporary areas, other private volumes
The Daily Incremental/Weekly Full backup schedule consists of
* 5 daily incremental tapes rewritten each week
* 3 weekly full tapes rewritten each month
* 2 monthly full tapes rewritten each quarter
* 4 quarterly full tapes rewritten each year
The Weekly Incremental/Monthly Full backup schedule consists of
* 3 weekly incremental tapes rewritten each month
* 2 monthly full tapes rewritten each quarter
* 4 quarterly full tapes rewritten each year
The Monthly Full backup schedule consists of
* 2 monthly full tapes rewritten each quarter
* 4 quarterly full tapes rewritten each year
In addition, as a Federal data site we are required to keep permanent
off-site copies of all data. The backups are performed by operations
staff who are on duty for sixteen hours, six days a week. (AFS backups
presently take about half that time).
ALW restore policy is to provide user data recovery within 48 hours.
File server disk recovery, of course, takes top priority and we use
a "triage" system to get critical volumes back on-line as soon as
possible; most "critical" volumes are user volumes, which are not replicated.
Since we have been using AFS over the past few years we have gotten
surprisingly few requests for data recovery from users. I suspect this
is because the majority of mishaps can be recovered by using the backup
clone. During that time we have restored 4 disk crashes. We have always been
successful in recovering data after losing a disk.
ALW recently went onto "cost-recovery" under which we charge client
workstations an annual connect fee and we charge users for disk space.
The rates are set to cover system services including client support,
server support, backups, and data recovery.
Sandy Orlow (Systex, Inc.) phone: (301) 496-5362
Building 12A, Room 2023 uucp: uunet!sandy%alw.nih.gov
National Institutes of Health Internet: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Bethesda, MD 20892 FAX: (301) 402-2867
