This title is used as a sample from Deltron 3030‘s track, Virus (video). I don’t usually cite the refences for my titles, but I felt this was extra appropriate.
We (as people in general, but sysadmins specifically) try to prepare for disasters. In the even that one does occur, hopefully we take something from our experiences and alter our practices / backup routines accordingly.
In my case, my office was fine for Katrina. I did have to get a tape mailed overnight, but overall, not too bad. There is, however, room for improvement. While we were okay in respect to the storm, I did lose a couple of days in simple hard disk addition last week. Then a tape failed. To rectify this situation, and improve the Hurricane Contingency Plan, I have implemented an off-site storage system.
Using rdiff-backup, my data is now backup up through a secure connection to a drive at both my apartment and to a server in our Houston office. Houston also off-sites to my apartment and our New Orleans office, in addition to their tape drive. While the initial copying may use quite a bit of bandwidth and time (at night, don’t really care), the subsequent usage is quite small, especially if I optimize/clean/restructure my files and filestructure for it. This is a pretty old network, and as a result, there are copies of copies of files, installers, etc. A clean-up is in order anyways.
To facilitate this new backup routine, I have also changed how my users utilize their Outlook. One of them has a .pst file that clock in at about 1GB. That’s alot of data to push. What i have done is broken it into 3 separate files:
current.pst: All work-related Email from 2006 (on a backed-up network drive).
archive.pst: All work-related Email from 2005 and before (on a backed-up network drive).
personal.pst: All personal Email (on their non-backed up local drive).
Instead of one 1GB .pst, I have a ~20MB current.pst (which will grow), a ~650MB archive.pst, and a ~300MB personal.pst
So, instead of potentially pushing 1GB of data daily (or as a restore) for this one user, I’m looking more at ~20MB, at least for now. Do the math.
Plus, should any of those files become corrupted, it will help contain the damage.
Much of my personal data was either not backed up, or inaccessible. And then my 250GB data drive failed.
So my home network is about to get a long-needed overhaul.