I was getting excited about the rsync thing until I realized it was not for
NT or 2000. I am a Unix admin, so I don't get excited about NT either, but
here are some additional things with the problem of backing up these remote
sites.

1.  The local staff are meter readers.  i.e. electrical company has people
trained to read meters for gas or electrical use.  They really don't care
about "servers" or tapes in servers.  :-(  I guess they could be trained to
perform this function, but that is not what they were hired for.

2.  Some of these sites may only have 56K bandwidth to a more central
office.  

3.  At most we may be talking about 9 GB of data, I think?  It may not be an
issue to do an incremental backup of some sort, but the first full is going
to take some time and may not be feasible across a 56K link.

4.  We recently had a vendor to remain nameless that tried to suggest a NAS
solution.  (crap)  It would entail putting some disks, a NAS device, either
in the remote locations or the central site or both and using that to backup
the sites.  But the problems are that the NAS appliances would be twice as
expensive as the NT servers, and  we still have the network bandwidth
issues.

5.  The other key I always have to ask about when someone starts talking
about incremental changes backups is what about doing a full restore?!  If
we do one full backup, and then only incrementals, if we ever have to do a
full recovery, it is going to be extremely slow.

So far as having tape drives or libraries at each site, we may be talking
about over 100 sites to install and maintain tapes and drives.  In general I
think management is trying to move away from each server having it own local
tape drive and tapes to manage.  Understandably this would seem like a
nightmare to be ultimately responsible for.  I don't think there is an easy
answer or solution, but I know someone out there has to be in a similar
situation.

Dan Sixbury


-----Original Message-----
From: Anderson, David [mailto:anderson.david AT scrippshealth DOT org]
Sent: Monday, March 25, 2002 3:55 PM
To: 'veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu'
Subject: FW: [Veritas-bu] RE: Backing up lots of small remote sites.


I originally sent this privately, but here is a public edition hot off the
press.
 
Rsync doesn't play in the NT relm.  That's a Unix-o-phile thing.  The
original question was WindowsNT and 2000 (I think, I've been reading a lot
of posts today).  You can do directory syncronization in NT, but I wouldn't
recommend it under any circumstance.

 
DMA


-----Original Message-----



rsync refers to rsync ;) 

        http://samba.anu.edu.au/rsync/ <http://samba.anu.edu.au/rsync/>  

Think rdist with more bells and whistles. 


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