In an academic shop, the cost to the enterprise of being unable to restore data is sometimes hard to measure - while the cost of backing it up is unfortunately right out there as one of our biggest expenses.
I know our situation is more than a little atypical, a LOT atypical, and I just deleted a 20-line explanation of the different sorts of stuff we have. In a nutshell, though: the really critical business stuff lives on its own secure set of servers and isn't in this picture, and we've got our students extremely well-trained to back up their own data. We know we want to be able to get the website back up in a screaming hurry, but most of the other three terabytes of stuff we want to back up is less critical. We don't want to go without backups but we don't want to pay as much as we're paying. (and backing up to RAID is still not on the table) Admittedly, I had not thought much about the tapes. Being an outsourcing customer does sort of hide that from you a bit. Part of what set this off, BTW, is that I lost one of my big RAID's, and did a 600GB restore. That took about a day and a half. Then, the next five days in a row we got socked with 600GB of data backup charges, as that 600GB got backed onto level 5,4,3,2,1 tapes in that order... _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
