Backing up data - it's not "rocket surgery"!
What's tape backups purpose one might ask. Well, backing up is only half the task - all the purpose is in being able to restore data. Without restoring data everything else is a waste. All in all a backup solution is supposed to give you assurance that you will survive a physical catastrophe involving your storage device (PC, Server, SAN, etc.) so that you can recover your data at a later time or on a different device.
There is no magic in all this. It's not rocket science any more that your DVD player or MS Access home inventory is. If the software can stream data from a server to a tape in a drive and then retrieve the same - that's all.
Most backup software does helpful tasks such as keeping a catalog so that you don't have to manually date stamp each tape and mark which server is on each tape along with the elements backed up (Files, Database, multiple partions, etc.)
Wow, is that all?! Yeah, that sums it up for most Sysads that I know.
Monday, March 23, 2009
Why does this blog exist?
"It's NetBackup, not 'NetRestore'"
-- intended joke from Symantec NetBackup support person on the phone
Why does this blog exist?
Well basically our group bought a SAN solution which lead to us combining that purchase with a newer tape backup product. The integrator was a large PC manufacturer who tied in with a major SAN provider and brought Symantec's NetBackup product in to do the job.
The criticality of having your SAN backed up doesn't quite give you the change to evaluate different products first hand and our budget certainly doesn't allow us to buy several physical servers to run different products on (tape drives connected via fiber don't allow the use of virtual servers in this case).
Normally if I found a product that sucked as mush as Symantec NetBackup does then I'd just concentrate on moving to another product and would not waste time documenting it in a blog. Alas, I'm stuck with this product for the foreseeable future and the institution has spent a large sum of money on it... so I'm blogging this for posterity.
Why does this blog exist?
Well basically our group bought a SAN solution which lead to us combining that purchase with a newer tape backup product. The integrator was a large PC manufacturer who tied in with a major SAN provider and brought Symantec's NetBackup product in to do the job.
The criticality of having your SAN backed up doesn't quite give you the change to evaluate different products first hand and our budget certainly doesn't allow us to buy several physical servers to run different products on (tape drives connected via fiber don't allow the use of virtual servers in this case).
Normally if I found a product that sucked as mush as Symantec NetBackup does then I'd just concentrate on moving to another product and would not waste time documenting it in a blog. Alas, I'm stuck with this product for the foreseeable future and the institution has spent a large sum of money on it... so I'm blogging this for posterity.
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