Re: the whoops! and off site tape storage

[PaulMmn <PaulMmn@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Our iSeries tapes go offsite on Mon/Wed/Fri mornings (with data for 
Fri-Sat-Sun/Mon-Tue/Wed-Thu).  The extra day(s) between pickups was 
deemed acceptable.

Daily saves are kept in a 35 day rotation; Month End and Year End 
saves are kept forever.

We use an offsite service which keeps our Mountain of tapes for us. 
Retrieving a case of tapes costs nothing extra as long as it's 
returned with one of our normal M-W-F pickups/deliveries.  An extra 
delivery on off-days or "now" costs extra.  I'm not sure how much 
extra, because we don't do it often enough to matter.

We also have a group of journaled files whose receivers are retained 
on-site for 6 months.  These are not used for recovery, but so 
programmers can debug things that go bump in the night.

Our programmer and QA libraries are backed up and stay on-site. 
Copies of the source go off site.  I hope.

On the network side of the house, however, the tapes haven't been off 
site in a long time.  Since they handle the email and PC files, they 
get a LOT of "I just deleted the only copy of the draft of the annual 
report.  PLEASE restore it for me.  I need it NOW!" requests.  *sigh*

At my 2nd job, however, we had an 'annex' building down the street. 
The night operator was responsible  for taking the backup disk packs 
to this building and swapping them for the ones already there.

Re: your 'whoops'es--  The dealy ought to make your programmers 
anxious to NOT cause whoopses!  (:


--Paul E Musselman
PaulMmn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx