kengr

At that company I worked for the backups for the admin building got hauled to the plant building every day. And the backups fr the plant went to admin.

That way they had the current backup in the other building.

And if something clobbered both buildings, then the backups weren't needed anyway because we'd have been out of business.

Common failure mode for backups is having just *one* set of tapes/disks/whatever.

If something going wrong *during* a backup, you've just hosed your only backup.

Also a good idea to make sure the backups are *readable* and actually contain the data they are supposed to.

Lots of places have cheerfully plugged in the backup, only to find that either it isn't readable or the process was mis-configured and the critical data was never written to the tapes.

recommendation from *way* back (late 70s) is to have a backup for every day of the week. They can be "incremental" backups.

On the last working day of the week, you do a complete backup, and archive it. You also shuffle the tapes by one day and open a new one which will become the "first day of the week" tape. With the former "first day" becoming second day, etc.

This eliminates worn out media as a problem.

You also make "end of month", end of quarter and end of year backups (extra tapes in this case). And you archive them. This way you can go back and figure out the way things were in the past with reasonable granularity.


A backup for the planet would really have to be more like the "disaster recovery" centers some big corporations have. Not just "stuff" at a different site, but something set up to be able to run things until you can rebuild.

That'll require a *very* self-sufficient colony.





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