On Thu, 12 Jun 2008, Chris Hoogendyk wrote:

> Another department I work for has been unable to scrape up any money for
> the backup system even though I've been pushing them and submitting
> proposals for 2 years.

Produce a "Cost of Not Implementing" report. Make it clear that you will
not be responsible for data losses not attributable to backup hardware
failure.

> I can't run nightly backups, because it takes
> several days to get everything done using the existing DDS/3 drives, and
> even then, I have a fair number of partitions that run off the ends of
> tapes

That won't happen with Bacula.

>  What's the cost of data loss? I'm expecting them to learn that
> someday. When the department head, or some influential department
> member, loses an important document or data file that happened to be off
> the end of a tape, or that we didn't back up because it wasn't in the
> time window, then maybe the money will appear and I will be able to do
> proper backups for them.

More likely, you will be blamed for their lack of planning, on the basis
that you are responsible for backups.

I suggest you cover yourself. Academia can be quite nasty when things go
wrong, even when it's the academic's fault.

We just spent $3200 recovering a 160Gb disk one senior professor insisted
didn't need backing up. When it died, she insisted she needed it recovered
and took it to the department head - end result was that the costs came
out of OUR budget, not hers - even though the department head eventually
agreed it was not our fault.

> In the meantime, I have plenty of proposals and requests to point to if
> anyone ever complains that their data is not being backed up.

That often won't help.

AB


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