A fresh, NEW hell!

[reddragdiva]

Some time year we're finally shifting our backups (buckets and buckets of oil exploration data) from DLT IV (35 gigabytes a tape) to SDLT (160 gig per tape). Which should reduce the daily load from five tapes to one and the weekly load from twenty-five tapes to five or six. In addition, we will finally be getting rid of the fecking jokebox - it was previously upgraded from DLT III to DLT IV, but, PRAISE BE, it's not smart enough to run SDLT.

The actual amount of data hasn't changed a whole lot in a few years, which is somewhat surprising. And I do look forward to DLT IV drives dropping to the sort of prices you can get DLT III drives for. I could do with a nice backup system for my MP3s valuable personal data. Our backups do get regular use, though usually it's office workers wanting deleted spreadsheets or PowerPoint presentations off the NT servers. (It is not my policy decision to give them their backups.)

Of course, SDLT offers an exciting new world of pain - it hasn't been in use anywhere for much more than a year, so we get to do the new and exciting thing. (Sysadmins like old. Old has the bugs shaken out. If I could run NT 3.51 when I had to run Windows, I would.) And the new system will involve another clanking Heath-Robinson device to shuffle the tapes around for us.

I'm surprised the DLTs have worked as well as they have, though. My esteemed fellow Unix admin seems to have a policy of reusing DLTs until a given tape is absolutely, positively proven not to hold data any more. A given amount of light must shine through the tape where the oxide used to be or something. (We, the bunnies doing said backups, have taken to quietly chucking tapes at the first sign of trouble.) And never mind the completely negligible cost of the tapes compared to the value of the data, particularly considering our business unit had its ARSE SAVED by the backups just a few months ago - it was still VITALLY IMPORTANT that I spend a large chunk of a day going through a box of three- to five-year-old DLTs just back from our offsite storage provider (who appear to be a clue-free zone staffed by frightened monkeys on crack) with a view to reusing the cobweb-encrusted things. These are of course queued to be the last tapes reused, but we aren't going to be buying any more. Because he's calculated we have enough tapes. Until the SDLTs come through and SAVE THE DAY!

I wonder how SDLTs last - how many cycles they run with data-grade reliability, how long before you should really chuck a given tape. I guess we get to GATHER THE DATA AFRESH OURSELVES!

In the meantime, we can be somewhat disturbed by the knowledge that, although Jeffrey Archer remains in jail, they still let him have a typewriter.

Today's weather is dismal. My umbrella actually broke off its handle in the wind. Fuck!

Comments

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

I actually convinced people that we should replace our oft-uncalibrated DLT3 stacker with an AIT3 stacker. This means attempting to pry $25k out of the administration (for a stacker and a separate drive for running restores on), but I think we can manage it.

Well, okay. We HAVE TO manage it, since they just bought us another terabyte for the toaster.

Now we just need to find out who to suck up to in order to get them to hand over $300k for a 7TB NearStore box to stick in our downtown network vault for off-site storage...