Hi,
We have several servers for a school of 1800 students each with 300 Gb 
or so of storage. As I understand it we use tape to do do a diff backup 
each night rotated weekly, a full each week rotated monthly and a 
monthly rotated I don't know how often.
Trouble is, each time a student loses work it seems to take four or five 
hours to catalogue the tape and then ages to seek out the files that 
have been lost, even assuming the right tape is being used.
The demands of a school are different to a business. How do the rest of 
you ensure that students on a fortnightly timetable can recover their 
work in a a reasonable time?
Howard

Soni tempori elseu romani yeof helsforo nisson ol sefini ill des Wed, 26 Sep
2007 21:11:11 +0100, sefini jorgo geanyet des mani yeof do
uk.education.schools-it, yawatina tan reek esk Howard
 fornis do marikano es bono tan el:

>The demands of a school are different to a business. How do the rest of 
>you ensure that students on a fortnightly timetable can recover their 
>work in a a reasonable time?

We don't backup to tape any more.  We use external hard drives.

Howard wrote:
> Hi,
> We have several servers for a school of 1800 students each with 300 Gb 
> or so of storage. As I understand it we use tape to do do a diff backup 
> each night rotated weekly, a full each week rotated monthly and a 
> monthly rotated I don't know how often.
> Trouble is, each time a student loses work it seems to take four or five 
> hours to catalogue the tape and then ages to seek out the files that 
> have been lost, even assuming the right tape is being used.
> The demands of a school are different to a business. How do the rest of 
> you ensure that students on a fortnightly timetable can recover their 
> work in a a reasonable time?
> Howard

Think of a pattern of frequent backups to a HD of some description 
(NAS?) with less frequent tape copies for durability.  Recovery of work 
from HD backups can be very rapid.  IIRC recovery from 4mm tapes is 
quicker than from the older Travan tapes (I have spent hours recovering 
a file from one of these!)

Malcolm

In article , Howard
 writes
>Hi,
>We have several servers for a school of 1800 students each with 300 Gb 
>or so of storage. As I understand it we use tape to do do a diff backup 
>each night rotated weekly, a full each week rotated monthly and a 
>monthly rotated I don't know how often.
>Trouble is, each time a student loses work it seems to take four or five 
>hours to catalogue the tape and then ages to seek out the files that 
>have been lost, even assuming the right tape is being used.
>The demands of a school are different to a business. How do the rest of 
>you ensure that students on a fortnightly timetable can recover their 
>work in a a reasonable time?
>Howard


You don't mention what OS you have - if you're running 2003 - you could
turn on Shadow Copy and let them restore their own deletions

http://www.petri.co.il/what's_shadow_copy_on_windows_server_2003.htm

On 26 Sep, 21:11, Howard  wrote:
> Hi,
> We have several servers for a school of 1800 students each with 300 Gb
> or so of storage. As I understand it we use tape to do do a diff backup
> each night rotated weekly, a full each week rotated monthly and a
> monthly rotated I don't know how often.
> Trouble is, each time a student loses work it seems to take four or five
> hours to catalogue the tape and then ages to seek out the files that
> have been lost, even assuming the right tape is being used.
> The demands of a school are different to a business. How do the rest of
> you ensure that students on a fortnightly timetable can recover their
> work in a a reasonable time?
> Howard

Backup to disk (ie SAN/NAS) and then backup to tape ... most stuff
that gets deleted gets spotted within a day or two so just keep that
on another volume and then back that one up during the day.

We *were* going to go for this but have decided not to right now as we
need the space on SAN too much. We will look at changing this at
Easter.

Tony

> Trouble is, each time a student loses work it seems to take four or 
> five hours to catalogue the tape and then ages to seek out the 
> files that have been lost, even assuming the right tape is being 
> used.

As others have said, back up to disc rather than tape - we just use 
robocopy (resource kit; free download) to copy the whole folder every 
night. We also use shadow copies so it's easy to get something back which 
got messed up during the day.

We changed because of the cost (we were spending over £1000 per year on 
DAT; we just bought a couple of tower PCs and stuck 4 x 500Gb drives in 
each - can't remember the cost but it was less than a year's worth of tape 
and it doesn't wear out like tape and gives near instant restore)



--  
Steve Rochford
IT Manager, College of North West London

srochford@cix.compulink.co.uk wrote:
>> Trouble is, each time a student loses work it seems to take four or 
>> five hours to catalogue the tape and then ages to seek out the 
>> files that have been lost, even assuming the right tape is being 
>> used.
> 
> As others have said, back up to disc rather than tape - we just use 
> robocopy (resource kit; free download) to copy the whole folder every 
> night. We also use shadow copies so it's easy to get something back which 
> got messed up during the day.
> 
> We changed because of the cost (we were spending over £1000 per year on 
> DAT; we just bought a couple of tower PCs and stuck 4 x 500Gb drives in 
> each - can't remember the cost but it was less than a year's worth of tape 
> and it doesn't wear out like tape and gives near instant restore)
> 
> 
> 
> --  
> Steve Rochford
> IT Manager, College of North West London
Seems like the best idea for for restores but how many discs do you 
have? We run a fortnightly timetable. If a student deletes all their 
work by accident they may not realise it until two weeks later. If we 
recycle the discs by overwriting older copies this would mean that we 
would need at leasst 14 discs!
Howard

"Howard"  wrote in message 
news:LoednbIC6ptDIWfbnZ2dneKdnZydnZ2d@pipex.net...
> Hi,
> We have several servers for a school of 1800 students each with 300 Gb or 
> so of storage. As I understand it we use tape to do do a diff backup each 
> night rotated weekly, a full each week rotated monthly and a monthly 
> rotated I don't know how often.
> Trouble is, each time a student loses work it seems to take four or five 
> hours to catalogue the tape and then ages to seek out the files that have 
> been lost, even assuming the right tape is being used.
> The demands of a school are different to a business. How do the rest of 
> you ensure that students on a fortnightly timetable can recover their work 
> in a a reasonable time?

First you need to define "reasonable". What is a "reasonable" amount of time 
to spend waiting for a restore? What is a "reasonable" budget to spend on 
backup solutions? What does the intersection of those two things give you?

We use Commvault Galaxy to backup to disk on a backup server, and from there 
to tape, using a weekly incremental routine. Recovery is very fast from disk 
with a system like that. It isn't cheap though.

We also use Windows 2003 server, which means that Volume Shadow Copies are 
available to us, we've turned that on everywhere it seems appropriate and it 
is an absolute lifesaver.