George;
1. Out of a typical 35hr work week we spend about 5hrs on backups
including modifications and stats gathering;
2. There are three of us involved on a rotational schedule including
on-call duties;
3. When we spend a great amount of time on backups, it's usually due to
changes made to our infrastructure which usually comes down to the Auto
Changer and storage nodes. :) So it's easy to justify it via
maintenance, usually scheduled.
To address your last paragraph, I am in completed agreement. Backups
would seem to be a simple enough thing that a "lights out" operation
would conserve up to 80% of a typical operator's job. However, and I
can only sport my personal opinion here based on personal experience,
that's just not the case. That only applies to a typical paper-world
scenario. It's my opinion that over 90% of the business world does not
subscribe to a "typical" environment or configuration. I know that we
are on the phone with support (for our particular backup product) at
least 1 / month. Normally our issues just seem to disappear with very
few solid answers. This is why we prefer to do 90% of backups manually,
we'll take the sure thing, which in this case, is an operator /
technician physically verifying the configuration prior to beginning the
backups and again while the backups are running.
The above applies to all backup packages I have had experience with.
They all seem to have 'glitches' of some nature but some seem to run
with far less intervention.
Cheers,
Carter Fowler
Hardware Services Technician
Technology Services Division
600 - 380 Wellington St.
London, ON, CA, N6C 5B5
OF: 519.661.5711
CL: 519.870.4956
cfowler AT london DOT ca
-----Original Message-----
From: George Sinclair [mailto:George.Sinclair AT noaa DOT gov]
Sent: October 30, 2003 3:01 PM
To: NETWORKER AT LISTMAIL.TEMPLE DOT EDU
Subject: How much time do you spend on backups?
Just curious how much time some of you spend on your backups. Clearly,
when new equipment is being installed or major software updates, you're
gonna be spending a lot of time, but let's just say on average:
1. How much of your work week is spent on backups.
2. How many people are involved.
3. If you are spending a lot of time, what's your justification? How do
you justify it?
Backups at my shop involve just myself and one tape operator. That's it,
just the two of us. Personally, I find that this whole backup thing is
pretty much a full time job unto itself. There is always plenty of work
to be done, and I can only automate so much, but some folks seem to
think otherwise. They say that with proper automation, a backup
specialist's job can be reduced by 80%, and if not, well then things
just must not be configured or set up right. I tend to doubt that. Can
anyone help me to justify that backups are not some simple thing that
you just quietly usher away at night, only to have some magical reports
and scripts just do everything for you? Would like to hear it.
Thanks.
George
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