 lost+found
Backups -- In a League of Their Own
W. Curtis Preston
There was a time when backups could be and would be ignored. They were
usually assigned as a collateral duty to the most junior systems administrator,
and that poor person had to fight to buy every piece of hardware and every piece
of media that they needed to get the job done. The hardest part about backups
was swapping the tapes. Boy, have things changed!
The Good Old Days
When I first started in this business about 9 years ago, we backed up the entire department to five 8-mm tape drives and a few QIC tapes — 60-MB QIC tapes at that! I rode shuttles from building to building, going to the different computer rooms to remove the previous night's tapes. Then I brought them all back to a central place, used a tape duplicating machine to copy them, and sent the originals to our off-site storage facility.
Then everything changed. We bought our first system that had more data than would fit on a tape. I tried adapting our little shell script that was never intended for such a job. Eventually, we gave up and bought our first commercial backup software package and a few tape libraries. Finally we could get our backups done without swapping tapes. We couldn't have been happier! Unfortunately, that wasn't good enough. Although we had a fine solution for our file system data, the database backups began falling apart. First, the Oracle DBAs started asking for hot database backups, as a nightly shutdown was no longer an option. Then the Sybase database backups that used to fit on a tape no longer did. How would we automate the swapping of tapes with a shell script?1 And finally, we had an Informix database that was so big that it required backing up to multiple tape drives simultaneously.
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