Backups was Restoring MBR - Solved

[rich at stainlesssteelstudios.com (Rich Borgatti)]

Rich Braun Wrote:
>I'm posting here, though, to query why the heck a company needs to store a
>terabyte or more of *anything*.  My home system has a tenth of a terabyte,
>mostly music files.  Companies don't need to back up music (unless they're
in
>that business) and generally don't need to back up video.  Customer lists,
>financial data, source code and that sort of thing simply don't require
that
>much space.

To say I back up a whole TB at the moment is a bit misleading, the server
max capacity is a TB. Currently only 408 GB is used, but goes up rapidly. I
estimate by the end of the project it will be very close to a TB.

We are a video game company. We do at least 5 - 10 builds a week of
uncompressed media, code and all art assets. Each build at the moment is
around 600 MB (ex. since jan 1 we have had 8 builds).

Every little change needs to be backed up. Early on in the project the
server had a melt down and we lost about a month's worth of work. That
situation definetly changed our backup strategy. Now with a server meltdown
we only lose maybe a few hours or at most a few days worth of work.

Richard Borgatti
Database/MIS
Stainless Steel Studios
<http://www.stainlesssteelstudios.com>
Rich at stainlesssteelstudios.com
<mailto:Rich at stainlesssteelstudios.com>



-----Original Message-----
From: discuss-bounces at blu.org [mailto:discuss-bounces at blu.org]On Behalf
Of Rich Braun
Sent: Friday, January 07, 2005 3:01 PM
To: discuss at blu.org
Subject: Re: Backups was Restoring MBR - Solved


Rich Borgatti <rich at stainlesssteelstudios.com> wrote:
> I have a TB of Data to back up and tape was too slow to do alone and auto
> loaders too expensive.

Agreed, if you have a terabyte or more then disk is the only way to go, at
least until some alternative medium arrives on the scene.  Tape may or may
not
be it, I'm thinking maybe the tape companies might switch to a
cheaper/faster
HDD-based cartridge solution a la the "Bernoulli" thing from the 1980s.  The
challenge is to get the price-per-gig of archive down to something
reasonable:
 if you want to keep a long history of dumps, it's prohibitive to keep a
file
drawer full of hard drives.

I'm posting here, though, to query why the heck a company needs to store a
terabyte or more of *anything*.  My home system has a tenth of a terabyte,
mostly music files.  Companies don't need to back up music (unless they're
in
that business) and generally don't need to back up video.  Customer lists,
financial data, source code and that sort of thing simply don't require that
much space.

So why is it that corporations are hungrily gobbling up storage just because
hard disks are so cheap?  Are they failing to discard the trash that users
tend to pile up?  What's being backed up here, and should it be backed up at
all?

Hard disks might have a one-time cost of 50 cents a gig, but implementing a
proper backup facility has a recurring cost of a lot mroe than that.  How
many
companies take this into account?  And are they doing proper backups, that
allow for quick disaster recovery and the ability to retrieve a crucial file
someone accidentally deleted 9 months ago, one that's need to file this
year's
taxes?  I could go on...

Pruning the archive is essential.  Getting users to eliminate useless or
potentially-incriminating data is also important.

-rich

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