Everybody's situation is different, of course.
But we are backing up about 400 desktops (Win95 and WinNT 4.0 workstations)
in addition to about 30 AIX and NT servers
We found that while it is desirable to have users put "important" data on
network servers, it doesn't really happen.
And if a user loses a file because it wasn't saved on a backed up network
server, yelling "NO NO BAD USER, IT'S YOUR OWN FAULT", doesn't really solve
anything. You may be able to assign the blame to the user, but the
organization is STILL out the man hours associated with rebuilding that
data, if not something more tangible.
The other thing we found is that with 400 desktops, there is at least 1 hard
disk crash or 1 user having a Windows disaster weekly, and when the users
lose a disk or have to rebuild Windows, they spend TOO MUCH TIME
recustomizing their desktops. Browser bookmarks, all sorts of preferences,
Word and Excel macros, templates, & toolbars all have to be rebuilt. People
spend DAYS dinking with their desktops when they lose their systems. .
SO here it became a productivity issue to support desktop recovery, not just
a data integrity issue. And because we want to get the user's customization
back, we back up the whole desktop, not just "my documents", or one
directory.
So we just do it. And with ADSM it's incredibly easy. In fact, most of
those desktops are backed up between 6am and 6pm. We just put all the users
on a schedule between 6am and 6pm. We've never had a network performance
problem associated with it, because ADSM minimizes the amount of data sent
(we do specify COMPRESSION ON for the clients.) And about half our network
is still 16 MB token ring. An average Windows workstation with an Office
Suite, mail, Word, Excel, etc., sends less than 100MB per day, on average
(after compression), and that's just trivial.
If you let users do software installs from Network server drives, or send
emails with document attachments, and you don't have a network problem, you
probably won't have a problem doing ADSM backups, either. An average ADSM
backup is no more of a load than that.
The biggest impact is on your ADSM data base, which will grow a lot. A
Win95 workstation with a typical Office Suite has 5000-6000 files, WinNT has
6000-7000. A desktop with a programmer's suite can have 20-25K files. So
you can calculate how your data base can grow. Just buy FAST disk for the
ADSM server. DO remember to set up EXCLUDES for "temporary internet files",
c:\windows\temp and the recycle bin, and other junk you are SURE you don't
need.
Do NOT try to exclude executables, if you want your customization back,
because you never know when some product is going to put stuff in the
Windows registry. And you don't want to restore the executables without the
matching registry entries, or vice versa. You need to either back up ONLY
selected directories, or the whole shebang.
The biggest headache is figuring out how to distribute the ADSM code and get
it automagically installed. (It's a lot easier now to set up the silent
install and get ADSM working than it used to be when you had to label all
the drives.) Currently the desktop support group is using Microsoft's SMS
for software distribution, but I think they had to write some fairly
sophisticated routines of their own to get the WinNT scheduler service
installed without user intervention.
It's also a headache to register 100's of users. I put all the desktop
clients in a separate ADSM DOMAIN, and gave the desktop support group the
authority to register the users in that domain, so I don't have to do it.
And you can, of course, set up macros to do bulk registration.
But, for all that, it works great! With ADSM we have no problem at all
putting a user's desktop back, right down to the last icon. Nobody ever got
very exited about our backup/recovery activities for network servers, but
you'd be amazed how popular we got when we told people we could put their
desktops back together for them!
(BTW, our server is ADSM V3.1.2.20 on AIX 4.2.1, with STK tape robots, DLT
and 9840 tape drives.)
************************************************************************
Wanda Prather
The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab
443-778-8769
wanda_prather AT jhuapl DOT edu
"Intelligence has much less practical application than you'd think" -
Scott Adams/Dilbert
************************************************************************
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Simon Watson [SMTP:simon.s.watson AT SHELL.COM DOT BN]
> Sent: Monday, August 09, 1999 9:50 PM
> To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
> Subject: PC Backups
>
> We are (very) successfully backing up UNIX and NT Servers with ADSM (on
> AIX, 3494 & 3590).
>
> We are looking into the possibility of backing up a number (approx
> 1,000) of the NT PCs around the organisation which have all this disk
> space on them which people seem to like to use, instead of the central
> LAN servers. The corporate policy has always been that if it is
> important then store it centrally. This policy is breaking down
> somewhat with the amount of data people want to keep and the already
> available disk space on their local PC, which is free. The only snag
> is there is no proper backup solution in place.
>
> I imagine many other larger organisations have struggled with this. Do
> we keep data centrally, or provide a distributed backup solution for PCs.
>
> I am sure ADSM can do the job. We have the server capacity - I think.
> We would need more client licenses of course. But the administrative
> overhead would be quite significant.
>
> If we did this we would use user initiated backups, and only backup
> specific directories eg C:\data. All our PCs have pretty much standard
> setups so we wouldn't want to backup the complete system for each &
> every PC. And I imagine we would use separate storage pools from our
> existing pools, without any collocation set.
>
> I would be keen to hear how other people have solved this particular
> problem. Has anybody got a White paper or anything examining the pros
> & cons of the two scenarios.
>
> Regards,
> Simon
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