On Thu, 19 Dec 2002, Matthew Temple wrote:

> Subject: Re: [Networker] tapes both recyclable and read-only?
>
>
>
> Much as I love Networker and have used it to reliably backup and restore
> many terabytes of data over the last 5 years, I don't love their
> man pages and I don't relish looking at their manuals.
>
> On the other hand, I can be lazy and overly in a hurry too.
> Good manual writers understand this and write their manuals from
> this understanding, rather than blaming the users for being in
> too much of a hurry.
>

I think Legato does a good job with the manuals overall, but I do agree that
there is room for improvement.  My particular beef is with the recently added
NDMP features.  My personal opinion is that the documentation assumes that the
user is familiar with NDMP and how sucky it is and that with a few one line
statements an administrator can figure everything out.  The release notes are
the crowned jewels of information regarding NDMP limitations.  And I will
quickly add that the limitations are due to NDMP specifications not the
implementation in Networker.

I run my server on Unix and I have read the Unix Admin Guide several times.
But I have a number of other clients (Windows, SQL, Exchange) and I have to
read the manuals for those products as well.  And then there is the Disaster
Recovery Guides and man pages.  There is a lot of documentation which all
contains different information.  I am lucky if I can find the time to read
them once a year.

With such a huge amount of manuals to pore over, it is easier and faster to
post a quick note to this list.  There are so much expertise here!  If you
think people should RTFM, then either ignore the post or point out the
relevant manual that contains the answer.

Shelley

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