24 Sep
2010
24 Sep
'10
3:39 p.m.
From: Dave McGuire
Sent: Friday, September 24, 2010 6:44 AM
My boss insisted on getting an 8500, though I
wasn't convinced of the
efficacy of the technology. I wanted to just stick with our trusty
QIC-150 and use a bunch of tapes for incremental backups. He wanted
full backups every time (I think he didn't really understand the
incremental backup concept)
[snip]
When I worked at Cisco, on the IT side of the house, we preferred doing
nightly full backups, rather than the industry-standard monthly-full/
weekly-incremental/daily-incremental I was used to. Why? Because it
took a *lot* less time doing a restore to a known point in time, which
meant that a system down had us out of business for a couple of hours at
most. This was good enough on our MIPS boxes, and even better on our
HP-UX 9000/870 servers with three-way mirroring, where we could break
one volume out of the mirror and do backups from it, then merge it back
in.
I took the same backup regimen with me to XKL when I moved north, where
it saved a lot of engineering time following system crashes on the dev
boxen.
Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Server Engineer
Vulcan, Inc.
505 5th Avenue S, Suite 900
Seattle, WA 98104
mailto:RichA at vulcan.com
mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org
http://www.PDPplanet.org/
http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/