Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!husc6!cmcl2!brl-adm!adm!preece%mycroft@gswd-vms.Gould.COM
From: preece%mycroft@gswd-vms.Gould.COM
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Backups on Live Systems
Message-ID: <8085@brl-adm.ARPA>
Date: Mon, 29-Jun-87 11:14:40 EDT
Article-I.D.: brl-adm.8085
Posted: Mon Jun 29 11:14:40 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 30-Jun-87 04:22:08 EDT
Sender: news@brl-adm.ARPA
Lines: 25

Well, we do our backups on live systems.  The idea of taking machines
out of service long enough to do dumps everyday would not fly -- there
are people on our machines 24 hours a day.  We do several levels of
dump and keep some tapes for very long times.  I have never personally
lost anything due to dump confusion, though it's certainly possible.
Restoring a broken filesystem is a pain in the ass, but unless you
do daily level zeroes (are there enough hours in a day to do that?)
that pain is inevitable.

On the other hand, I'm sufficiently paranoid that I have emacs save a
spare copy of any file I modify.  The spare goes into a filesystem
on a device I don't otherwise work on and has the file's complete
path name in its name (for a while I was doing this over NFS, but the
irritation when the repository machine went offline became rapidly
too high).  Thanks to the repository copies I can usually get the
latest version of a file I'm working on even if the device it normally
lives on goes belly up (head down?).  This makes me less worried
about the 24 hours between dump cycles ("What do you mean I ONLY
lost one day's work?!").

-- 
scott preece
gould/csd - urbana
uucp:	ihnp4!uiucdcs!ccvaxa!preece
arpa:	preece@Gould.com