My opinion is that it is better to use exclude lists.  That way you have
to be explicitly told NOT to back something up rather than be told you
SHOULD back it up.

When the day comes to do a restore it won't matter that you had a policy
that "they needed to tell us about new filesystems" - you'll get the
blame for not having backed it up because its your job to do the
backups.  

By doing the excludes and forcing them to tell you NOT to back it up
you'll have an email to point at if someone later asks why it wasn't
backed up.

Of course you could get rather broad in the "exclude".  Our policy here
is we don't back up test/dev Oracle files and databases unless
specifically requested and JUSTIFIED.  This is on the theory that one
can always "recover" a test/dev environment by refreshing from the
associated Production environment and that we have limited backup
resources and windows.

-----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
Donaldson, Mark
Sent: Thursday, November 06, 2008 6:48 PM
To: VERITAS-BU AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] What are your thoughts on filesystem
monitoring?

The majority of our NFS mounts are not backed up on the server that's
mounting them.

We have "cross mountpoints" checked but "follow nfs" unchecked.

We mount all NFS servers to a central machine and back it up there.  We
consider this more managable than trying to decide on what server a
multiply-shared nfs mount will get backed up and where it should be
excluded.  For example, a common filesystem for us is used to distribute
software across nearly a hundred servers.  To backup it up 100 times
would be insane.

We really need to consider changing from a central NFS backup server to
using the NDMP method of backups but haven't implemented yet.

-M

-----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 MPish44
Sent: Thursday, November 06, 2008 3:28 PM
To: VERITAS-BU AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Subject: [Veritas-bu] What are your thoughts on filesystem monitoring?


Good thoughts here...  thank you!

One other question.  What about NFS mounts?  we have had to explicitly
list those in the policy else we just backup a place holder filesystem
"folder" with no data in it.

Is it better to just have the backup selections for a Unix F/S backup as
"/" and select Follow NFS and cross mount points or am I asking for
trouble?

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