On Mon, 25 Mar 2002, Sixbury, Dan wrote:

> 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.

I would be uncomfortable entrusting data backup (and restoration?) at so many
sites to non-IT staff.

> 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.

Yes, the initial full will be a problem, if you do it over the wire.  But, you 
have backups going on already.  Why not take a fairly recent tape(s) and 
restore 
to your mirror area?

> 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.

Unfortunately not every vendor is capable of making a logical choice for your 
environment.  :(  And some just don't care except for their own bottom line.

> 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.

The data you have at the central site would be an exact copy of the remote.  
You 
can do an ad hoc backup of this to tape, and ship out the tape.  All data will 
be there.

Time to courier a tape will be an issue.  Can you wait?  Any central backup 
solution will have restore issues in either time for the courier to get there, 
or time for the data to get there over your slow link.

> 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.

Central management sounds like the most attractive choice for backups and 
restores, even with the time issues for restoration (data transfer via slow WAN 
links or courier).

Ron.