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

[Ben Summers]

On 22 Sep 2004, at 17:19, richard_eigenmann wrote:

> <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.

In this case, the administrator should set up the machine so that they 
can only save data in places where they're supposed to be.

>
> 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!

No. And it should run on a server, not clients.

>
> 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.

That is a very sensible policy.

>  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.

In which case you'd probably want to get the entire OS just to make 
sure.

Ben