People measure both ways, and I recommend they do so.  It's important to
know that eventually all your backups worked every day, and it's also
important to know how many failed in order to get there.  Some customers
try to ignore the latter, as they say to us, "all our backups were
eventually successful, so who cares if they failed along the way?"  My
usual response is to ask that if 100% of their backups failed every
night and had to be retried, would that concern them?  They tell me, "of
course."  Alright, then.  We agree it's a metric that should be
measured.  The only question is what level of failures is acceptable
under that metric.

Most people try to shoot for 99%, but many people never get there
without professional help.  I believe that you should aim for 100%
eventual success (first metric above).

You can't look just at success rate, though.  (Unless you're always
getting 100%, of course.)  You have to look for consecutive failures.
It's bad enough to miss 1% of your backups every night.  What if a given
client is always in that 1%?   If you're not looking specifically for
consecutive failures, you could find that an individual client has not
backed up in two weeks.

---
W. Curtis Preston
Backup Blog @ www.backupcentral.com
VP Data Protection, GlassHouse Technologies 

-----Original Message-----
From: veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
[mailto:veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu] On Behalf Of X_S
Sent: Friday, January 04, 2008 5:24 AM
To: VERITAS-BU AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Subject: [Veritas-bu] Enterprise Backup Success Rate (Non Technical)


do you guys count retries to the success rates?  number of Job Attempts
as opposed to just number of Jobs.  Our overall completion rate is
fairly high as well but i too wondered the definition of "success rate"

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