[lore] How to be a crap sysadmin Part 1: Backups

[David Basden]

Copyright (c)2006 David Basden, All rights reserved
A non-exclusive, non-transferrable licence is granted to the University
Computer Club to publish this article in both printed and electronic
form as part of a single edition of the publication "Murphys Lore".
---

How to be a crap Sys-Admin 
David Basden [DGB]

Part 1: BACKUPS

Okay, so you've been given an ultimatum. If you don't do backups, you
don't get to keep your job. There was some meeting with some managers,
they used the term 'action-item' a few times, and you're the poor sod
who got to set the thing up.

The important thing here is to set something up with as little effort as
possible, and to never, ever touch those backups again.  The expensive
off-site host crashes under heavy IO load, and only has the write head
working on the tape drive?  No problem.  Backed up the 3 terabyte SAN
to a 10 pack of 5 1/4" floppies? Sleeping like a baby tonight.

The thing that most people just don't get is that disaster recovery
only really applies when there are DISASTERS. Really, when was the
last time you saw one of those. Earthquake? Cyclone? Flood? Tsunami? In
PERTH? Chances are that none of these have taken out your workplace in
recent memory, so there's no point wasting time on the off-chance the
will in the future.

In the meantime, you could spend half your time running around, making
sure that tapes are rotated correctly, that your disk array is correctly
snapshotting, or whatever. Weigh this up against the chance that you
would care about your workplace once your house was half a metre deep in
raw sewerage: "Damn. I'd really love to save some of those irreplaceable
personal possessions and family members, but the disaster recovery plan
says I've got to be on-site in 15 minutes!"

And let's face it: There's nothing on that SAN other than MP3s and the
CEO's porn collection anyway.

	(David has worked as a sys-admin in various industries for
	 most of the past 10 years before giving up in discust and
	 returning to uni. Where events have been based on real life,
	 names have been changed to protect the incompetent. If you
	 take this column as actual advice, I've got this bridge in
	 Brooklyn I want you to take a look at)