[Box Backup] BoxBackup Server Side Management Specs (Draft0.01)

[richard_eigenmann]

<snip> 
> I would have thought that in such a department you would have a means 
> of recreating the workstations very quickly, perhaps using Ghost for 
> Windows or a custom installer for UNIX. In which case you'd only need 
> to back up the data.

It depends on the sophistication of the administrator, the uniformity of the
configuration, the size of the organisation and then the degree of protection
you require. With some users you simply can't rely on them not storing their
important data in applicaion directories, temporary locations, on the root of
the disk or anywhere else that makes no sense.

I always advocate creating a single directory that contains all the important
data (in subfolders) so that it can be easily backed up and moved to the next
machine. However, people tend to agree with me and then continue in their old
habits until the inevitable happens.

Of course there is also the issue of mounted lan drives that a user might
want to have backed up with boxbackup. Ignoring the inonde / mount point
issue for a moment we could find situations where the configuration would
back up some Lan directories from multiple client machines as well as from
the server backup too. I think setting up the client side backup is not
something you want to leave to users!

On the other hand I wonder where and why organisations would want to back up
workstations at all. At my workplace I don't believe that my workstation is
backed up. If it blows they clone a new one and I'm back on the lan. Local
data will be gone. That is communicated and if you don't follow the
guidelines then that's your problem. Laptops, however, can validly have data
locally. Laptops can also be tricky with drivers and nonstandard
configurations. If it's not a large organisation that can mandate the use of
only one single standardised type of Laptop then backing up the OS with it's
specific configuration probably makes a lot of sense.

Regards,
Richard