Hi Bobby,
        As an SE for a Backup Hardware Vendor (thatâ??s NOT STK â?º), I can 
tell you that I encounter many customer's who are running much larger 
environments than you described with one body and (if that person is lucky) 
someone to back them up or at least partially cover so they can take a vacation 
once in a while. I have also seen customer's with equivalent kinds of 
environments with 2 or 3 people working on them and doubling as Sys Admins. 
        I think it would be useful for you to see where you spend your time in 
managing backups? If it's on maintenance/troubleshooting due to failures, you 
may have a problem with your Hardware or configuration. If it is on managing 
the complexities of the environment, then you may need to take some time and 
work through a simplification scheme. Backups are tough, but they should not be 
requiring a lot of babysitting. Your responsibility for backups on the systems 
you don't own can be problematic if access is an issue. If there are enormous 
levels of restore requests, this can be a time suck as well.  If you take a 
good look at where your time is spent with this process, you might be able to 
see where changing 'X' (where X is anything from HW to SW to scheduling, to 
policy setup, to distributing work (I.E. what Charles said about patching and 
restores), could reduce your workload for backups. 
        One way or another if you spend a lot of time managing backups, then 
something isn't right and a systemic analysis is probably in order to identify 
where/how things can be made better. 


Mark Pinder : Systems Engineer: 303-449-6444 x1551
                                         Cell: 720-394-0732
Spectra Logic : 1700 N 55th Street Boulder, CO 80301 US