This is very true. One of the things I forgot to mention is that we used
to backup desktops. We're mostly in the research computing business, so
we "only" had around 100 desktops and laptops we backed up. That said,
the overhead of checking to see why that system failed its backups was
high - in many cases the desktop would be powered off, or the user would
have taken the laptop home.

The staff overhead of figuring out why each backup failed was high, and
we ended up letting a bunch of the failures slide. At that point, it
raised the question of why we were expending so much time and money
trying to back those systems up, when we couldn't find the time to
figure out why they failed. Unless you have a good way to ensure the
backups are actually valid, complete, and timely, the value of backing
those systems up is questionable.

-- Skylar Thompson (skylar2 AT u.washington DOT edu)
-- Genome Sciences Department, System Administrator
-- Foege Building S046, (206)-685-7354
-- University of Washington School of Medicine

On 12/10/12 10:15 AM, Rick Adamson wrote:

With the higher probability of workstations being susceptible to data loss, compared to 
servers in a secure data center, either from a system failure and/or reload, our company 
decided that using a domain policy which redirects the Documents and Settings folder (as 
well as newer OS's "Users" folder) to a file server. Their official position is 
that you NEVER keep business data on a workstation device. Ultimately this saves a 
significant amount of money in storage and licenses.
Additionally, this practice lowers the cost of the desktop support team 
managing end-user systems. They no longer need to be concerned about business 
data when performing OS reloads/upgrades.
HTH
~Rick

-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of 
Zoltan Forray
Sent: Monday, December 10, 2012 10:42 AM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: [ADSM-L] Backing up desktops/workstations

I am looking for war-stories, experiences, suggestions, ideas from you folks 
that have implemented backing up desktop machines, which could expand into 
thousands of additional TSM nodes.

I have been tasked with looking into doing this.  The current guidelines is to "only 
backup 'documents and settings/users' folder, excluding all music files 
(mp3/wmv/wav/flac/ogg)".

My first thought is to stand-up a new server (or two).  Create a default 
policy-domain with short retention (30-days or less) with few copies (2) and a 
cloptset with an exclude everything and include doc & settings/users plus 
exclude or the music files.

--
*Zoltan Forray*
TSM Software & Hardware Administrator
Virginia Commonwealth University
UCC/Office of Technology Services
zforray AT vcu DOT edu - 804-828-4807
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