Lux Interior asks:
"Help! I am the ad-hoc computer guy in a small satellite office of a larger company. We have no CIO, no IT department, and no policies whatsoever as regards data retention or backup. Therefore, a lot of company property exists one place-- on individual hard drives. The office is made of almost entirely of rudimentary users, on WIN98 and 2000 machines, who never, ever, back up any company information. Has anyone out there had experiences in a small-office setting with: changing users' behavior in regards to managing their data; setting up best practices for backing up information properly; and making sure that the most computer-apathetic users comply with what you've put in place?" Sometimes the best way to make users conform to policy is to not give them a choice in the first place. Automated backup systems on each workstation can go a long way in helping this. Which software packages have such functionality (the more unobtrusive, the better)?
"Several weeks ago we lost six years' worth of extremely important data on current and continuing projects that not even a data recovery service could get back. As a consequence, it is now my job to make sure this doesn't happen again. I have an offsite data storage service retained, but now, how do I get people to back up their files to our file server so I can back up our data from one location? (Also, having the data backed up on our file server of course means that most inadvertent deletions can quickly be fixed in-house).
This is all taking place in a Windows environment, with an NT 4.0 file server, and I am far from an experienced Sysadmin.
Fun, Fun, Fun.
Any input from slashdot readers would be great, and save me much dyspepsia, insomnia, and general hassle."
Slashdot Mirror
Don't mess with the users, they'll revolt and stomp your geek ass into the ground.
Cunning linguists
that'll teach them to backup! BOFH!
Backups? We dont need no stinking' backups!!! Now go order that executive leather chair for my office.
"The United States has no right, no desire, and no intention to impose our form of government on anyone else." - Bush 05
I wouldn't call this "easy" but there's plenty of sites that should have instructions on re-usering people to log on to the fileserver as a domain server and resetting their my documents folders to be on the file server... then it's just going around and mopping up. Then you back up the file server and tell people if it's not in 'my documents' then it's gone gone gone and its their fault.
Automating backups on workstations, very bad, very difficult. For example, getting people to not turn them off, or even turn off a power bar (wake on lan doesn't work so good in such a situation.) What you do, if you're on NT, is set your system policies so that my documents, all that stuff, is on the server, in their home share. Tell them to put everything on home share. Tell them that anything that's on their hard drive, and lost, will be their responsibility. Explain why they need a central data repository. MAKE DAMN SURE YOUR BACKUPS WORK, OR YOU'LL LOOK LIKE AN IDIOT. Then, if need be, pick a sacrifical lamb. Back up their harddrive, then engineer a 'hard disk failure.' Make sure something important was there, that wasn't properly placed onto the fileserver. This'll drive the point home.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
with the workstation agents installed on the machines. Works great but make sure you check on the backups every couple of days.
If the user doesn't want to be bothered backing up their data, make them sign a waiver absolving you of responsibility when (not IF) disaster strikes and s/he loses vital data. At least then, when they're angry and upset and looking for a chump to take the fall for their stupidity, you've got a convenient ass-cover with their autograph on it, and it won't cost you your job. :-)
~Philly
Create a network drive that everyone can use, H:, the home directory. Usually already set up on networks, but whatever. Tell people that any work related stuff that isn't saved to the H: drive will be deleted.
Warn them a week in advance, warn them a day in advance.
Then, in the middle of the night, format everyone's machines and stick fresh OS installs on all of them. If possible, ghost one machine's fresh install and use it everywhere. Then, the only backup you have to worry about is the H: drive.
If anyone ever has a computer problem, just reghost their drive, removing whatever pointless software (screen savers, comet cursor, kazaa, etc) that got installed and caused the problem.
Minimal hassle for you, easy backups, and everyone will fear you.
[o]_O
changing users' behavior in regards to managing their data; [...]
:)
Violence is the keyword
I'm in the same boat - geek on a construction jobsite. I set up a Linksys Gigadrive as the "server", and set a policy that everone put there stuff there.
Then I implemented the policy by moving their data directories lock, stock, and barrel from their local drives to the shared drive, and deleted from there local.
Changing the default file directories on MSWord and Excel also does wonders.
A little bit of bitching from the semi computer literate, but after that, no problems. Now I just back up the Gigadrive.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
I think the easiest thing to do would be try to do it yourself remotely. Under Windows 2000, you can access the administrative share as \\machinename\c$ , so map those drives to some server somewhere(preferably one with lots of disk space), and have it auto-backup those computers at midnight(by just pulling the files right off the harddrives of those machines). It's not too tough to make Windows 98 share files so only the admin can use the share, just make sure you set up the right access-lists on your routers to stop the netbios-over-ip traffic from leaking onto the internet. No problem -- in theory at least, I'm sure there are implementation hassles.
It's been a long time.
Build yourself a samba server on your favourite brand of UNIX (I prefer Freebsd, many don't). Attach a tape drive and use Amanda as your backup program. Get them all accounts on this machine and get them used to using their "Z:" drive for everything. Then everyone has a daily backup and you are in control - which helps a lot when dealing with people less technically competent than you.
You can try training as much as you want but in my expierience users never listen all that well. Of course one or two will but on the whole the group won't. You can automate it for them which is the best in the users eyes. If all your workstations are desktops on all the time you can write a quick batch script to Xcopy the mydocuments and other data folders to your server where they can be backed up nightly. Then notify the users that these are the standard folders that get backed up. Finally you can do nothing. There are those that backup and those that will. If they lose something valuable they usually start backing up :-)
i was in a very similar situation not too long ago..i, of course, realized the necessity of backing up important data regularly, but no one else in the office seemed to care. i decided to simply let nature run its course if the users were so apathetic towards back-ups. after a month or so, the inevitabe happened..a user lost close to a year's worth of information! they came to me and were on the verge of tears. all i could do was say "well, didn't you make the back-ups like i recommended?", to which their reply was a indignant "no!" you can bet from then on, the user made back-ups -- on top of this, the user went around and started hassling other people to make back-ups too! sometimes, the passive approach is best..
Those who can, do. Those who can't, go into business for themselves.
Policy doesn't work until something really bad happens and someone with real power in the company says "Do it or you're fired".
I've been in this situation with dozens of companies, and policy only takes root when error rears its ugly head.
Sometimes the errors cost headaches, sometimes they cost you a lawsuit.
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
Dear Slashdot, I don't know how to do my job. If I don't do my job right, I fear I'll get canned like the old sysadmin did several weeks ago when everything went to hell. Can you tell me how to do my job? I've heard you're a bunch of computer gurus. Thanks, Lux Interior
to the server. That will handle a large chunk of the problem. The rest of it is just go into the programs that you use and map the preferences of the default folder to one on the server. If that is not an option, then you have to teach the users what to do and if they don't follow the policy and data is lost, it's thier problem.
One policy that I have seen many time is if the data is not backed up to the Network (ie server), then it is not your (you, the IT guy) responsibility if it is lost.
but be ready to install disk quotas. You'll be suprised at the number of twinks who will backup his/her ENTIRE C drive.
It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
Once a week, go around with a tape drive and dump the harddrives.
You, if they have the money, could move everyones files over to network drives, and lock them out of their computers hard drives. Just use the individual drives for the OS
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
ok, so they lost six years worth of data and now you're responsible to make sure it doesn't happen again?
:-)
Is the company in the energy business?!
Seriously, this is a big deal. If this happens and management aren't taking responsibility for it themselves, then quit. If you don't have the experience to deal with it, then you're about to become the fall guy.
*crawls under the desk and starts to cry again*
There's a utility in Win2K, (intuitively called the 'backup' utility), that allows a setup of recurring backups (incremental or full). If you can get access to your users' computers, you can run the utility to backup specific folders on a regular basis, keeping them completely unaware of the process.
:)
It's hard to find, so if you go to 'help' under the start menu and do a search/index-search on 'backup' you should find a link in the help pages to the 'backup utility'. I've found it to be quite handy.
As for win98, well, Good luck
We have a shell script cron'd to go off every night that mounts users hard drive's via smb, then backs them up with tar to a raid. Then we archive those to tape for an offsite backup. The raid backup is great because when I get a "I just deleted my spreadsheet" call I can have it back in a few minutes. Your only worry is making sure they have there c$ "administrative" share available for your data syphon. You could even get snazzy with it and make a web interface with php/apache like we did, but were a bit larger operation and have lUsers using the system.
edge
Well, if they're not terribly skilled with computers and save to the hard drive because it's the path of least resistance, make the fileserver into the path of least resistance.
Go around to each computer and go to the settings of each production level program that you use (ie Office for argument's sake). Set the default save directory to that of the mapped drive letter of your NT server. When they go to save files, the save dialogue will use your fileserver as the starting point.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
I deal with a lot of real estate agents and I have yet to find a nice complete backup system for under $500. It needs to be automated and require little to no technical knowledge. (Flipping CDs is too complex for them. They want something they don't have to touch.)
Does such a system exist?
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
My Company uses Connected Backup. All data is stored in encrypted fashion on remote hard drive, which presumably the IT dept. would then back up to tape or disk.
We used to have users copy important (company critical) docs to a remote drive which we backed up, but there were issues with encryption, incrementals, etc.
Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it. -Samuel Johns
no policies whatsoever as regards data retention or backup
1) Too bad you don't have a policy. You should have one set.
2) If you're ad-hoc, clarify your position and responsibilities with your manager... If you undertake such responsibility, just construct a policy and apply it.
BTW, amanda is great for site-wide backups.
If enough users are Windows 2000, format the drives as NTFS and lock them down. Don't allow them to write files to their own directories. Obviously, some concessions will have to be made for application use, but they probably won't find their way to the few directories where they could theoritically save files. Give all users mapped network drives, both personal and shared, such as H for their home drive and S as a departmental drive, K as a common drive, etc. Again with 2000, point their My Documents folder to their H drive, making them save stuff to the network without realizing it.
Now, get a good back-up scheme on your file server, which I assume you already have, and you won't have anymore data loss problems. It also removes accountability from you. You manage the computer systems. Tell users that IT is simply not responsible for data lost off their local HDs. If they ignore you and then lose data, shrug your shoulders and point to IS policy. That'll learn 'em and learn 'em fast.
My good friends at the FBI suggested I use the "Carnivore" backup utility.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
We use Veritas NetBackup with a user base of slightly less than 150 users. Very unobtrusive, relativly easy to setup and configure and good support from Veritas. This system does incremental backups and will not duplicate files (i.e. if one user has their W2K system folder backed up, other users will not). We have it configured to do complete backups on everyone's machine so that if we have a machine die, we can just burn some CD's and completely rebuild them in an hour or so. You could simply backup the data folders if you didn't have the drive space on your server. I don't have the priceing info in front of me, but it was very reasonable compared to the other options we persued.
Each night, when everybody has gone home, just randomly delete a few files off of each users hard drive. Eventually you'll hit a file that they really need and they'll see the benifit of ritutally backing up everything they need.
Problem solved! =)
I had to deal with a similar situation a while back. For the users that didn't understand they had a user directory on the server we used a simple batch file which ran xcopy on a couple of their directories to copy files for them. Place the batch file on their desktop and call it backup.bat. Tell them to run it before they leave every day. And be sure to let them know what directories are being backed up.
Or you could use backup software on the server that supports client agents or over the network backups.
distributed data storage/automated backup = NIGHTMARE!!!
The best way to do this is have ALL company data (as far as possible) stored on centralized file servers. Then you can:
1) administer backups on a SINGLE machine
2) toss/move/rebuild desktop computers at will
3) rebuild much easier in event of a catastrophe
Centralize, man. It's the only way to go.
-- Aaron
In a situation like that, you're probably going to find that the users are so accustomed to keeping data on their hard drives that they simply won't back anything up on their own. Most will simply refuse to do it.
Even more unfortunately, an automated backup system probably won't help either. With a mixed environment like that, you're going to find that most users have data scattered all over their hard drives, making it virtually impossible to backup anything less than the entire drive. Not a good idea if you're dealing with any more than 5 to 10 users.
The best idea in this case would probably be along the lines of having each individual user move all their important files into one directory tree. Don't even tell them it's for the purpose of backing up, because then they probably won't do it. Make up some story about viruses destroying random data, and tell them that this is part of a prevention method. It sounds totally idiotic, but they'll believe it...instilling fear is usually the best way to go. Once they've moved everything, make sure they know to keep all their data files in that same directory tree from then on, and set up a scheduled backup on each machine - hopefully to a networked tape library or network drive of some sort.
Give this a few months, and get them used to keeping their data in a very specific place, and then start giving them network storage space to use instead. It will make the backup process a lot easier, and you'll be able to do it daily instead of once every week or so.
In any case, you have to approach this very SLOWLY, or you'll freak them out and they won't be any help at all. Baby steps, man...baby steps.
One of the things we do at my company is, if a pice of software allows you to set the defualt save directory,(MS word/access/excel/ect) is simply to point that to a user directory on our local fileserver. That is of course assuming you have a fileserver.
Changing people's philosphy on where to store data goes a long way.
We have a server with a large-enough tape drive to back up users' data. We then encourage people EXTREMELY to save important data to their personal LAN Drive, and eeinforce the idea that the Hard Drive should be considered expendible. No excuses, no tears.
We then back up the data nightly and rotate tapes daily during the work week (M-T-W-TH, and Weekly Friday Tapes, with the Last Friday of the Month going on rotating Monthly Tapes.
It a bit of habit-breaking for people used to saving everything to C-Drive, but a little Pavlovian experience of "Ohmigosh, my file is gone!/Oh wow, you got my file back!" will reinforce people that Hard Drives Are Bad/LAN Drive is Good.
You can even reinforce the idea with encouraging people backing up files on floppies/CD R/W Drives.
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
You can dictate a whole _lot_ of end-user data retention by creating (and in some cases forcing) roaming profile usage. This will ensure that everytime an end-user logs off their workstation, that their Word/Excel/Whatever files (in My Documents) gets saved to a central point on your network such as a file server.
Most programs (such as any Office program) can also be set to use a mapped network share as a default save location. If you include a mapped network drive to a folder within their login script or user profile, this same central point can hold THAT information as well.
From that point, you simply backup this central repository.
In the case of users NOT logging off their workstation, boot 'em off with time/day-based login restrictions. I have found that if you keep preaching the use of end-users' network drive for storage, you stand a good chance of permanently altering their behaviour. The trick is to keep reminding them of it!!!
+that's funny...I don't FEEL tardy.+
So, you have two options: (1) If you have reasonablu fast network connections, take the choice away and install automated workstation-to-server software that runs every night. This won't work for roaming laptop users though. (2) Hold a series of "computer training classes". Say 4 or 5 half-hour classes where you teach e-mail ettiqute, tips and tricks, Internet searching, that sort of thing. Make them mandatory (you can usually finagle this through the HR or Training group of the parent org). At one of the classes, discuss backup, then pull out a form stating "I have attended the backup class and understand the consequences of failing to back up my work. My department and I accept full responsibility for failing to use backup tools provided". Require them to sign and turn it in (again, HR and Training will usually help with this). Send copies to the department heads.
That won't prevent data loss (or even the loss of your job if something goes wrong!), but it will help somewhat and also get at least some people thinking.
sPh
Your job as an admin (parent) is to help them make an informed choice, provide sympathetic support when someone learns the hard way about a bad choice, and let them have the learning experience.
That said, the conventional approach is to:
- Provide a networked fileserver which is backed up nightly (and actually DO the backups!)
- Facilitate desktop access to this server, and educate users on how to make use of it for both fixed installation and laptops
- Make sure that your training is part of the new-hire education
- Hope that someone blows it and loses data
WHEN someone loses everything ('cause it's not "if") get as much press as you can. Make sure everyone has the chance to learn from one goofball's mistake, but remember: It's not your problem, it's their problem if they choose to ignore your advice!Come on, this is absurd. If the sysadmin can't figure how to backup user data, its time to switch up the sysadmin.
put a clause in the employment contract "You must make use of the source respository and backup systems we provide or you're fired." ;)
You just used singular "they" and "s/he" in the same sentence. This fucking language is going to hell, and it is being driven there by people like you.
Something else that might work is instituting group fines on the groups that do not backup regularly. A company I worked for did something like this for leaving sensitive material out overnight on our desks. I did it once by accident. After my boss found the fine to tehe group, he came down on me and I NEVER did it again.
just my $0.020314159
--Keeping the flame wars alive, one post at a time
I was the oh-so-often-abused ad hoc computer guy for a 10 station network with the same problem. After weeks and months of all kinds of efforts (autobackups, memos, luncheons, torture, etc.) I found that the only thing that worked was for me to actually backup people's systems for them.
If you're really crunched for time on a regular basis (as I was, and sometimes this didn't happen as often as it needed too), it may not work so well for you. But I simply went around to everyone's PC on regular intervals (usually once a week, the place was a weekly newspaper) and informed the user that I needed to use their workstation for backup purposes. This also gave me a chance to make sure nobody was downloading anna kournikova pictures or opening nefarious email attachments in their ignorance (and without the hassles of spyware!). Obviously, if there are a lot of users, this won't work out so well; but I found that most of the users on that network were much more receptive to my sitting at their desk for a few minutes a week than having (GASP!) another computer related responsibility.
bona-fide sludgesicle man,
pub
HP used to sell a NAS (Network Attached Storage) box called the HP Autobackup. It ran a version of embedded NT by Previo. Once configured it was pretty easy to administrate. Don't know if they still sell 'em, but you could probably find one on eBay...
While I'm in a Mac environment, I believe Retrospect is fully cross-platform.
What we did here before we went to a centralized server architecture is we ran full backups once a week (and incrementals every night) from the users' desktops to a backup server, then backed that up to DAT (this was years ago - now I'd use DLT).
With Retrospect client on every desktop machine, you can unobtrusively cause each desktop to be backed up in the middle of the night, when network traffic is light and files are not in use. If the user shuts down, Retrospect interrupts the shutdown process and waits until the backup is completed before allowing the machine to power off.
It's also real good at preserving the state of the system, making it easier to restore from bare metal.
http://www.dantz.com
Just have them save all of their documents to the network file system drive. Have a great big meeting and tell them that anything that isn't on this drive is not backed up. It's not that big of a deal. Give specific examples of what they can and can't put on the drive, why it should (or should not) be there, etc. You'll have a few users who don't get it, and perhaps never will, but that can't be your problem.
We used to have the same thing in my office, and I was in the same position. We setup a network file server with lots of hard drive space, and forced users to logon to the domain. Then we secretly replaced their hard drive with 4 gig versons, so there wasn't much room for them to be saving on. And then we setup a nightly backup of that entire server. Withing 2 weeks, pretty much everyone had their stuff on the network, and as an added side effect, we came up with a naming convention for saving client data, and all client data is saved in the same place now, making finding info much easier and much more efficient. Every user also has a don't ask, don't tell, personal folder that only they (except me, of course) have access to. For personal stuff, like docs, pictures of family, mp3's, pr0n, you name it, they got it...
Hope this helps
Th
If you need periodic complete system backups get some removable hard drive bays, some 100GB disks and Mondo
Automated software on ALL the workstations...are you NUTS? Just set up a server and have their logins map out a home directory based on their username, then tell them if they dont save their files to their home directory, anything that happens is not your fault and they are SOL. Linux/Samba would be good for this, just set up a cronjob that backs up something like /home/directory/*users*/ nightly to a tape drive.
In college, really poor, need a flatscreen.
Try setting all of the users "My Documents" folder to folders on your server and get them to save all of their work to there since it is default fro most MS programs it might be easier to implement that policy.
Yep, the last small company I worked at had the same problem.
.bat file which could be placed in Windows Task Scheduler to run the program as need be to transfer all the data to our backup drive, which was mapped as a network drive in Windows. The developer even added client-side zip compression to make it nice and tidy.
The way we fixed it was to have one of our developers write a small Windows prog for us (I think in Visual Basic?) that had a standard Windows Explorer interface to select folders and such to be backed up, then wrote a small
I think it took him about 5-6 hours to create the program. It was great, I was very grateful to have a developer who knew something about writing small programs for Windows.
Palaces, barricades, threats, meet promises
go here for an important addition --- The TTM (Tom The Movie) Website
First, find out what their habits are. Do they like to keep everything all over the place, or do they keep everything in the "My Documents" folder. If it is the second one, then map out their "My Docs" to a server, they will be backing up their data without even knowing it. If they are speratic savers (ie. they save all over the place) then have management bring down the hammer, and force people to comply, what you dont want to save there? Have management bring in the thugs to rought people up a bit. dam()
Useless sig.
Then become the data gestapo and slowly, kindly, patiently drill it into their head to always save things into "My documents." If they ask you to help them with their computer, and you see files that should be in the "My docs" folder, move them there, after they get used to always loading stuff from there, they will get used to saving there too.
The key is patience and Persistence. Practice your waitress smile! ;)
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Assuming you have any control over your own system at all and that you are on even a rudimentery network (simple peer to peer even) all you need is a decent tape backup for your system (fill out req form) and a copy of any decent backup software that will come with it. Stay late one night and give share access (password protect of course) from thier drives to your log in (if you cant figure this out then your office really does need a nerd!). Set up a daily backup for the week and dont bother with individual files but merely backup thier save folders (my documents, ect), dont bother backing up their O/S's as thats what install disk are for. Swap out the tapes every morning and hide a memo about what you have set up on your bosses desk somewhere for him to forget about. Congradulations you have just taken on one of the responsibilities of the IT dept. If you have a IT dept (even in another site in the same city) for the company and they just havent set this up then have them fired and i will send you my resume;)
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise. -Fight Club
Well, you can build policies & security into the desktop to prevent their access to the local drives. Lock the PC down as much as possible and force them to use the server. (this means getting rid of Win98 and going strictly NT or 2k)
That's the easy part. You're really fighting not so much a technical battle, but a political one.
Depending on the attitude of the users, forcing them to behave might not be popular with them. I.e. do they see you as a pain in their rear, or do they just not have the time (care)?
But if your CEO backs you on it then I guess it's tough nuggies...
Lux Interior is a IT manager now?
Damm last time i saw him he was practically swallowing a microphone mumbling something about being a human-fly
This is not a technical problem, this is mainly a behavioral and cultural issue.
Users aren't going to do *anything* they don't prefer to do, and you have no way of compelling them to do the "right" thing. The post about domain logons and establishing "My Documents" on the network server is excellent, but the users could still save everything on their C: drive. (They probably will because a network share is usually slower than the local hard drive, and they're used to using C:.)
My recommendation would be to gain and establish management support for a backup policy. To do this, you will have to demonstrate to management the risks inherent in not compelling users to back up their data - such as loss of operational data, client lists, engineering data, etc.
Ideally, management would issue an edict that specified that employees were responsible for cooperating with your backup regimen.
Short of this, it ain't gonna happen, because users are basically "stupid". (Defined as shortsighted, unable to see the big picture, unable to imagine loss of data, etc.) And without a real enforceable policy with disciplinary measures in place, they are going to skirt the policy, count on it.
Unless you can figure some way to do this without their knowledge or without requiring them to do anything, or even not do anything, it will always depend on the users in some way. Tbe best case is if you automate the process over night or something like that, but then you've got to depend on users to not turn their computers off. If you want users to simply copy their stuff to the server somewhere, well then you're depending on them to do this regularly, and they won't! especially if they've had no backup procedure or policy before. The sysadmin is always in the crappiest of positions, you depend on the users to do their part but if they don't it's your resposibility to fix it. The easiest way would probably be to give everyone they're own directory on the server that their login script maps to, and constantly urge them to copy their important files to it then you've got control of the backup If you're real savvy you can have a script run daily that checks the newest file in each directory and if the newest file in there is more than X number of days old send out an automatic e-mail or something to that user urging them to back up. Also educating people on the importance and reasons for it, this should be easy in your case if they've lost so much data already. If people understand the reason, and it's easy for them to do, and are gently urged/reminded they will usually do what you ask. You'll still have people who won't do it though, be very aware of that!
Good things never end "eum" they end in "MANIA" or "teria"
On your NT Server, consider a decent tape drive (I recommend Qualstar robots) and a copy of Veritas Backup Exec. Then, set the users profile to point their My Documents folder to the server - or their enitre machine for the fact. Veritas will automate the backups for you. I've done this several times with great success. Email me if you need help!
-brian
-brian -- Brian D. McGrew { brian at visionpro dot com } --- > But his grip on his santiy hovers somewhere bet
Check out Retrospect by Dantz software. We use it for a mixed network of Macs & PC's. Backup occurs automatically from all workstations at administrator defined times. This way, you don't have to "teach" everone to store to a network drive or anything like that.
downsides of the passive approach...
;)
you may get fired for not stopping the problem before the users learn this lesson
Is fast easy to setup and use. Not too expensive.
Does not have a linux client yet but does mac and
windows. Also very frugal with tape space as it
is smart enough to not duplicate the same file
over and over on the tape. I use one with a super DLT drive and I can fit an entire month of backups on 2 tapes. weekend backups fit on a single tape. I have 30 some workstations and several servers.
Use Retrospect from Dantz. Cross-platform, unattended, client backup and restore, saved my ass a couple of times - your users will never notice.
I agree with most of the earlier posters: stick their files on a fileserver and back that up as often as is required. That way if, i mean when, windows bites the dust they can continue their work from another computer, AND nothing is lost. The easy way out is not always the best way.
In this house you will obey the laws of themodynamics!
Ignorance kills, complacency kills, hatred kills, but usually not the ones guilty of them.
If forcing them to a fileserver isn't an option, the major players are Veritas, Legato, and TSM.
I'm a Legato admin myself. It's got the capability of backing up user workstations, provided you buy the licensing for it, which is probably true for any of those three. Licensing isn't cheap though, and which one is best for your situation is going to depend on your environment (Legato for example, isn't worth the cost for a small office).
Why these over a samba/amanda solution like some of the linux zealots on here are saying? Tech support. If something goes wrong, you always have a vendor to fall back on, management usually likes that. That can help you too, management is more likely to accept "it can't be done" from a vendor than from you and your homebrew.
On the subject of vendors, avoid StorNet. You'll get better tech support from a magic 8-ball than from them.
"...We lost six years' worth of extremely important data..."
If something like this can be prevented, perhaps paying the salary for a full-time IT person to do backups does justify the cost.
"You cannot find out which view is the right one by science in the ordinary sense." - C.S. Lewis on Intelligent Design
I've dealt with this in your exact setting. They will not take it upon themselves to do any more work than they have to. This was true for each person until they personally lost all of their data. Then they would religiously save all of their data on a server drive.
Why is this under the 'Linux' topic?
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
If you're predominately running Windows 98 and 2000, I recommend upgrading everyone to 2000 if at all possible. Then you can use NT Backup to write selected data to a server. It may not be the best solution in the world, but it's cheap since NT Backup comes with Win2k.
Then if you're concerned about backing up the server, you can buy a single tape drive and perform a bakup of the server; you'll get everything at once. If you need a server with more hard disk space, my company has been buying completely customized kits from California PC Products. We just put together a dual Athlon 1.9GHz w/ 1.5Gb RAM and 1.5Tb storage space (RAID 5) for about $6,000. Running Linux with Samba shares will cut the cost even more, and will also speed up data transfer rates.
If that doesn't sound like a viable option, look into Veritas backup solutions. We've been successful using their product, but it is more costly.
Much of your decision will probably come down to exactly what you need backed up and what you can afford. Good luck!
...are hard to reconcile.
I suggest setting up the NT server as the corporate fileserver. (Or at least the fileserver for stuff that needs to be backed up.)
Next I would suggest writing a company policy regards the mandatory use of said fileserver. Try to convince management and have them approve it so the policy can be enforced.
If that succeeds you can just make regular backups of the fileserver.
Just my 0.02 EUR.
---
NT is silly in the way that it doesn't work, and it's sick in the way that it does work. In a way.
I'm not the sysadmin around here, but we use a little program called "Mr.Mirror" from WarpGear software.
Mr.Mirror
Mr.Mirror creates mirror images of a selection of directories and/or single files. Features include: logging, file filters, templates, zip compression, find redundant files, networking, drag & drop, a built-in scheduler and more.
It's a pretty simple tool but it does the job and it's pretty cheap to boot. It requires some support on the backend to copy the data onto tapes or something, but it's definitely worth looking into.
You buy a TAPE DRIVE. Do not buy a cd-rw. Buy TAPE. Get DDS-3 dat, or VXA, or AIT, or DLT. Make your life easy, buy an autoloader. Make sure retrospect supports it (they have a list). Buy enough tape capacity to back up all the files on all the hard drives without you having to sit and change tapes for hours on end. Retrospect will automate the entire deal so you just need to be there to pick up the pay check.
Someone will give you grief about the cost of tape drive. Tell them to FUCK OFF. Tape drives are CHEAP compared to how much it'll cost your company to LOSE DATA. Buy LOTS of tapes.
With this, you back up EVERYTHING. The first part of a new backup is a pain, but from then on in Retrospect will just back up the changed files, making life very easy. Use multiple tape sets and rotate so you always keep a couple of good backups around.
I can't stress this enough, back up EVERYTHING. Do not say "I will only back up 'my documents'". People save their files all over the damned place and never know where they are. They delete stupid system files they didn't know what they were for. Once you're over the pain of the first full backup, which can take a couple of days depending on the size of your place it's easy and the incrementals are fast. And you can do DISASTER RECOVERY. As in "my hard drive crashed and I lost everything, please restore my computer to the way it was". You can point, click, blast everything onto a new drive in the machine and the machine runs exactly as it used to.
Do not wait for disaster to happen to try this, after you get a backup under your belt. Go through the restore procedure. Get another hard drive and practise doing complete system restores so that you can do it in your sleep when your CEO calls you at 2am to find his deleted girlie pictures.
If you can do this, your cow-orkers will love you. Women will love you. Men will want to BE you.
Dramatic maybe, but I'm a damned happy user of Retrospect for years and it has saved my ass more times than I can count. There are other products (Backup Exec) but I have not used them, and so I cannot vouch for them. I use Retrospect every day.
The problem with that approach is portability. Most offices these days are full of people with laptops, who expect their computer to work just as well at home or on an airplane.
There are quite a few s/w packages for synchronizing file systems. Maybe that would do the trick. Set up the synch s/w to run in the background, and whenever they are on the network synch the important local dirs with corresponding dirs on the server. Back up the server.
Light cup, beer drink, thin so chain, neck turtle fat, man I won't say it again
At some of the locations I've worked at Iomega Quicksync is on the base loads of all the machines. It works great, and the user never sees anything other than a "Quick sync completed" message when they go to their machine in the morning. All transparent. They can even specify the directories you want to back up and the location you want them sent to (network drives in this case).
Get a tape drive and Retrospect from Dantz. If you only have one NT server, you can get Retrospect Workgroup; otherwise, you'll need Retrospect Server. You install the client software on each workstation or server you want to back up, and install the server software on the machine with the tape drive. Then you just activate all the clients, create a couple backup scripts, and change the tape every night before you leave. All this is really simple to administer because Retrospect was originally designed and written for the Macintosh. It's also fairly inexpensive, at least compared to (a) the cost of your time trying to roll your own backup solution and (b) the other backup systems on the market (which are often harder to administer and less functional).
Retrospect can easily be configured to yell at users that haven't been backed up in a certain amount of time, to either back up their entire machine or just a part of it, etc. You'll still have to get users to leave their computers on, but that'll be the extent of it.
I prefer whole-machine backups; everywhere I've used Retrospect, that's what we've done. Retrospect is smart, so it won't back up 10 copies of an identical file just because each one is on a different computer. And Retrospect also does incremental backups out of the box, so you're only backing up what changed *and* you can restore a machine to exactly the state it was at at the time of any given backup.
Sorry for the commercial, but I've been using Retrospect for my own network for 6 years now and have done work for shops that use it for 9, and I have yet to see a better backup solution.
An easy hack is to change the user shell folders location in the Registry to a network drive somewhere. This will divert any saves to "My Documents" to said drive (supposing most of the data is going to the default save folder). Then run some sort of backup system on that network drive.
.reg script when they are logged in). Now you have a networked home directory a la something kinda like NFS.
You can easily do this with domain policy, or just run around and change the entry (it's in HKCU somwhere) as they are logged in (or get them to run a
Ummm... there's about three different ways to do it (well):
1. Map My Documents to a remote share on your file server, backup that drive, and setup policies so that data can't get saved locally.
2. Tell the users that local data may be deleted at any time, and they're supposed to use the space you setup at \\file_server\home_directories. Have a nice long meeting drilling in the point, then remind them the day before (do it in the morning and right after lunch) that you'll be deleting local files overnight. Do a fresh install of your OS of choice, configure it to access the home directory of whatever user is logged in, then ghost it over. This has the advantage that any computer is sufficient for the user's needs, as every computer is identically configured.
3. This is the least intrusive, and thus probably best. But I didn't see it mentioned yet (browsing at +1), so thought I'd say it. Most Windows machines share their drives out by default under administrative names... \\computer_name\c$, \\computer_name\d$, etc. You may need to configure Win98 to share out its drives, but thats trivial. Have a network backup server that just backs up the contents of each of these shares in turn. The users never even need to know that you did it, until something bad happens
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
we solved part of this by setting all of the programs the users create files with to store and create in the my documents folder. the target of the my docs folder is the users home directory on a win2k server. The home directory is available offline and set to file sync between the workstation and server. Then we backup the server with tapes. it is not pretty but it keeps the users from thinking about it and it is fairly cost effective.
I worked at a place where some jackass wasn't backing up the server with the source code repository -- THAT was a big deal. But I don't consider losing 6 years worth of email any great loss. Was the stuff from 6 years ago really that important?
Only by losing everything are we free to do anything. -- Tyler Durden
I would set up the system so that people can make it work and tell people clearly how to use it (as some have said, setting "My Documents" to be on a server is a good idea). From that point on, it's darwinism -- those who don't care (like me) or can't grok it will lost data and those who do can save themselves.
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
(a) Fool them, or,
(b) Scare them
But you sure as hell can't trust them. They're users, remember? It ends up being akin to herding some sort of animal. Usually cats. Although I've heard it called a goat rodeo as well.
So, take route (a): re-map all writable directories to the server and lock down the rest. Or take route (b): secretly back up a drive and then crash it to put the fear of [insert deity of choice (BOFH is a deity)] in them.
Not saying anything anyone else didn't, just trying to conglomerate all the reasons and routes in one post.
Do not touch -Willie
Arkeia? Last time I worked with this, you could do all sorts of cross-platform stuff and it seemed pretty robust. Then again, I never really pulled the guts out of it, either - it just worked, and I was happy with that. :)
~N~
Connected Corp has the best offering in the automatic backup of user machines. Their product will simplify your life. You'll wonder why anyone needs an IT staff for backups. And unlike most backup products, this one is actually designed to make RESTORE easy, not just the backup. Great interface, great price. http://www.connected.com. I think they have a free trial.
Central File Server
Give them all a pretty icon on the desktop to their own folder on a central file server. Name it "My Documents" or something. Tell them to copy all their important files to it, and to save all their work to this folder in the future. Pull a little BOFH a week later by swaping the hard drive of some guy in marketing with a defective one. If he backed up his files send out an email praising him, and if not send out an email making an example of him and tell him off about how many hours you had to screw around with the ACME hard drive utiltiy to get his files back.
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
I use a "homes" share and make all users put
anything useful on their home directory on the
network drive (mapped to the same letter on
each machine).
I also instruct everyone that they should never
keep anything useful on their local drive...
Obviously this is not as ideal as backing up
everyone's machine to a central server, but
that would be a ridiculously expensive and
painful solution IMO.
...the users will save things to their local hard drive anyway because "the network is too slow" etc. And then not only will you still not be backing up their day-to-day work files, you'll also have at least two copies of everything -the "official" copy on the workgroup server and the "unofficial" (aka "real") copy on the user's HD. And you'll be lucky if there's only one "real" copy instead of one on each of the five PCs belonging to users who are working on that document.
:-)
When I worked in a medium-sized office we had a fairly simple plan: backup-exec every PC's My Documents to a tape drive in the server room overnight. We explained -as often as necessary- to each user that their files would be backed up every night but only if it was in My Documents (and their computer was left turned on). Most of them got it right away and the rest learned fast after their first experience of losing a file because the HD crashed (or whatever) and it wasn't in the backed-up directory
Seriously, getting users to do something efficient like store and work on documents out of a central repository is a separate issue. Backups are about disaster recovery, and the way to do it is to accomodate your solution to the way people work right now, not the way they really should work but won't because it's too much bother and their computers don't crash often enough to keep it in their minds everyday.
*** ***
SuiteSisterMary:
MAKE DAMN SURE YOUR BACKUPS WORK, OR YOU'LL LOOK LIKE AN IDIOT.
Speaking as a former idiot *koff*, that goes without saying.
Any backup system should be tested and shaken-down to verify that data is recoverable. (Then again, any good autobackup system should have a Verify Mode, and a log of the backup to review the morning after.)
The amount of blood, sweat, toil, tears, and non-comped off hours will be worth it.
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
Twoflower
--
Twoflower
Is HERE.
I found the easiest way is map a drive to a network share. Make a backupmyshtuff.bat on thier desktop that copies all of thier data to the share. users are good about it if it's only a double click. much beyond that and they won't do it.
I recently spent a great deal of time looking for a network device to backup a small (25 people) network, without having to learn a new operating system or master a complex package. Pretty basic needs, and one shared by (?)millions of offices around the world. I couldn't find one product. The Linux people suggested a whole bunch of stuff, and I eventually moved to that, but what a pain just to do something that should be set up and run through a browser interface. I'm thinking something like the Lantastic Firewall.
It does an excellent job of handling media rotation and redundant backups, and is fairly easy to use. It started on the Macintosh (and to be fair, I've only used the standalone mode on Macintosh--never the Windows version.) It'll work with tape, filesystems, removable disk, FTP servers, MO, and packet-linked CD-R[W].
I just wish they had UNIX and Linux clients....
Set up a linux backup server running samba. crontab rsync to hit each boxes c$ share. rsync has options to work with samba. Tell your users that you'll backup everything they put in their c:\documents and settings folder.
Get your users used to saving data into particular folders, even the my documents folder. Set the archive folder and set up a process which backs up all the data for all the achrive folders on the lan. Works like a charm.
"Automated backup systems on each workstation can go a long way in helping this."
At my company we don't actually back up each machine... more like back up the network itself.
Each Win client will have a folder shared with user level security. These folders are to be backed up. We have one server running Linux and BRU. This server has each clients' shared directory mounted (-t smbfs), and backed up each afternoon. We of course stagger the backup routine to save one client at a time. Nightly backups are no good since most users shut their machines down before they leave.
So far it has been working pretty well. We only lose information if the user saves data in non-shared folders (very rare since we typically share the DEFAULT folders for each application)... or the hard drive crashes prior to the daily backup.
The only problem is backing up more than half a dozen clients to one tape can chew up a lot of tape.
It is not an IT responsibility to make sure that business users are saving their data to a network drive that is backed up. Your only responsibility is to provide the network space, make sure everyone can access it, make sure the backups work, and notify the business users as to the risk of not saving things to this location.
It's up to the owners of critical data to make sure that critical documents and their revisions are being saved to a Network drive and not "C:\My Documents"
-josh
Back them up against a wall and shoot them.
Then, just back up the server...
Take a look at these links for more information:
Configuration of the My Documents Folder
Folder Redirection Feature in Windows
Best Practices for System Policies in Windows 2000 Networks
Not centralizing shared data is just a bad idea.
We have two main file servers (RAID 5) here at the office. One for business files and general user storage. The second file server is used for whichever current project we are currently working on (read: DOOM). We use VSS as a centralized source code repository.
Things are backed up nightly to an offsite file server (1TB of disk space) connected to the office via a T1 connection, and every week, we back up critical files to DLT (Business files, contact database, the VSS directory, and all materials for our current project) which are then moved offsite to a secure storage facility. We rotate out and re-use tapes in 3 month blocks, so that we always have the last 3 months of data archived offsite.
The offsite backup server connected to the office via T1 has come in extremely handy from time to time. Artists sometimes overwrite their files and come begging for "last nights copy", which is a simple matter of just connecting to the server and pulling down the last backup that was made.
It would take some nasty catastrophe to completely wipe us out seeing as how we have full copies of our current work in two seperate places outside the office.
We have not had a catastrophic loss of data ever since I've come on board with id over 5 years ago.
-Xian
I work for a lawfirm, and we make every effort not to allow users to store the documents they need locally. iManage is what we use for this. It integrates with the Microsoft Office suite, so that when the user hits Open, a dialog box for the stored documents server is brought up instead. As well, Save automatically brings up the form to save the document into the document management system. Nothing more complicated than that is usually needed. Users have to go out of their way to save things locally.
Kickstart70
If you are a small outfit, you may want to just have periodic imaging of the drive's data until everything is settled down.
Which means that everything on the workstation's drives are backed up regularly.
Once you have that in place, standardizing the workstation would be the next step I would do.
Initially standardize it so that there is a regular set of tools for everyone. (This depends on how expensive the licenses are), but it saves time later on when you happen to get audited because everything is standardized, any illegal software that fails the audit could prove to be grounds for dismissal if you wish to implement those rules.
Once you have a standard to build on, work on getting that standard platform secured so that the system will enforce the policies for you.
Then deploy it. Make sure you have someone verify it for you first. Its going to be problematic if you deploy without User Acceptance.
Good luck!
--
Archie - CIO for hire
Archie - CIO-for-hire
I was faced with the same issue at my workplace so after some research here is what I came up with. I downloaded Cygwin and installed it, making sure to install Rsync, onto each desktop. After installing Cygwin with Rsync I wrote a simple batch file utilizing Rsync which copies the folders I selected onto a mapped network drive (which is linked to my server).I setup this batch file to run each night using the windows task scheduler. The user does not need to do a thing, all they need to know is which folder to use to store their data. The batch file then performs an automatic archival backup each night it is scheduled to run. Then all I have to do is perform a tape backup on my server and all of their data is safe and sound. No complaints and once the initial setup was completed very little maintance. The batch file is easy to modify and can be customized for each machine. If you do some searches on Rsync you'll see similar uses for this program on Linux systems, I just used Cygwin for windows to port it to a MS envrioment. Hope this helps.
Before I took over this network there were no home directories and no workstation backup. Since then I've implemented home dirs with quotas. But, most users still won't use them. I send out reminders occasionally.
The only people that use them are people data important enough that they know they'll get in a LOT of trouble should it go away, and people that have lost data before. The average person still doesn't save their documents and data until something bad happens. I've done all I can do, the rest is up to them. They aren't children and we've explained the risks. I've had Directors lose very critical data and my boss and the CIO have always said "Too bad, you told everyone where to put the data to be backed up. Their own fault.".
You're going to hear many comments saying the same thing, "set them up to use the file server for storage." Here are a few things to consider with that central file server:
Set up the file server nicely (if possible) in the first place. I would recommend an inexpensive Promise IDE RAID (they're cheap, fast, and reasonably reliable). The number of drives will determine what kind of RAID strategy you'll take, but be sure to include redundancy in the hard drives themselves.
Make sure permissions are set properly. Set up a user for each workstation to access their files on the central server.
Disable all unnecessary services on the file server. Install the latest service pack and hotfix packages. A good virus scan program will be helpful as well, and perhaps a software firewall if you don't have another solution implemented.
Good luck.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
- Make sure that the new solution is in place and working. It sounds obvious, but users will pounce on any problem in the new system as an excuse to avoid changing their behavior. Debug your new backed up file server thoroughly.
- Start with the power users. Transitioning onto a file server is an unusual problem in that it CAN actually be done one user at a time. Cultivate good habits in the people who give advice to the rest of the office.
- Use TweakUI on the clients. The TweakUI powertoy lets you specify a disk path for the "My Documents" folder. You can remap this to the file server's drive letter, causing it to pop up as the default storage location when people hit save.
- Carry out activities which highlight the strengths of the new system. For example, rotate people's machines out for service. When they ask what to do about their files, help them move them to the file server, and explain that that's where they should be anyway.
If you MUST do workstation backups instead (really, you don't want to do this), I have used the Retrospect system from Dantz. When I used it (admittedly several years ago) it did about as well as workstation backups can.Christian Hicks
I use this device for 2 satellite office where the users are completely computer iletterate. Expensive but believe me it's worth it. You can manage the device through an html interface and see all the status of the backup of all the users. The features of the configuration of the device is really worth it!
t ml
Check this review:
http://www.networkcomputing.com/1305/1305rant.h
Well for all the networks I setup,(Samba, NT or Novell), I create a logon script with the following in it:
/m /y /s "c:\My Documents" "\\orion\%bkname%\My Documents\"
/homes/logonname)
/My Documents will copy up to their network home directory.
net use u: "\\orion\%bkname%"
xcopy
In their autoexec.bat
set bkname=logonname
make sure they have a share or directory named after their logon name (Samba does
Whenever they logon to the network all their changed data in
Make sure they set all their applications to store data under My Documents and you are home free.
MC neodigita
Has anyone out there had experiences in a small-office setting with: changing users' behavior in regards to managing their data; setting up best practices for backing up information properly;
Lottsa Luck...Here's how we do it:
1) If you can - get the users to always save their stuff under one directory, say, C:\data\
2) Set up a Linux or BSD box to do a G-zipped, SMBtar of each C:\data\ each night.
3) If the workstation is trashed then you have to reinstall the OS & the Apps. At least you have the data availible.
4) The backups on the "SMBtar" server sit on the hard drive. Get a big drive for it.
5) Buy a commercial backup system for the NT server and get full backups of it as often as possible.
Also for the workstations: you could just do an SMBtar backup of all files with the "archive" bit set, by going through the admin$ share. Don't bother to save the system or the Apps. ( or the swap file! )
(:-L~
In fact, take a HUGE amount of liquid nitrogen. Pump it into the ground, below the bedrock, with as much force as possible. Then, when hell freezes over, users might start backing up their own data.
:-)
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
We use snap servers with their software to backup the workstations to the snap server's disk. It works pretty well...the snap servers are ~$500 for a 40 gig...they have much bigger unit for more $$$. Take a look.
© 2004 The SCO Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Well just convert everyone who is not Win2k to Win2k or NT4. Then you as the admin can access everyone's harddrives using the c$, d$ shares... then have a script that backsup everyones data to the HD...
OR.... use a centraly located profile and logon/logoff scripts to map a drive from your file server to their machine where all of their "user data" is stored to be backedup.
Simple answers to a simple problem.
"Times may change, but standards must remain the same." - George Carlin.
It is the only way... Have users data automagically backed up from a central site... Say you will backup everything under some directory, and just do it. Then train your users to use that directory to save their important work.
Make sure you can restore systems from what is available in that directory though, all the backups in the world don't do a bit of good if you can't do a restore afterwards
Since it seems it is a small office setup, I suggest you do:
The extra backup is to CYA in case something goes very wrong.
Of course, this assumes that you are the only guy l33t enough to restore data, or you might get exposed.
While you're basking in your newly found hero status, suggest and implement a technically sound way of backuping (see others posts for this)
Disclaimer: for the sarcasm-impaired, this post is intended to be a joke. Do not blame me if you get fired becoause you tried this!
If you are in a situation where you need a cheap solution (relatively), get a PC, drop a 120GB hard drive into it, and use Symantec Ghost (or something similar) to make a backup of users entire hard drives via the network. Then you would just need to back up the one PC. You would need to work out a schedule (ghost on fridays, tape backup once/month, etc), but it might be workable if you're on a budget...
There's a really easy way to do it. Windows Terminal Server. Outside of a few choice software packages, it's rather easy to use, and will run all your MS Office apps just fine. Then you just have to back up the server itself.
;)
Otherwise, I suggest that you upgrade everyone to 2000, lock their machine down to all hell, and make sure that the only place they can save documents are on the server.
However Terminal Server comes free w/ 2000 server. (NT4 as well...)
However, in the land of MS haters, I'm a heretic on this matter.
Be afraid be very afraid. Also try to get the "ad-hoc Computer Guy" association linked to someone else. You don't want to be the schlepp who has to help your end-lusers with their soon to be lost data.
IT Manager and regretting it.
My general strategy would be similar, EXCEPT for the CEO. Just backup his data after he goes home, and compliment him on how well he's backing stuff up. Then when everyone complains about backing up, he'll well - back you up - so to speak.
-- Ken Kinder ken@_nospam_kenkinder.com http://kenkinder.com/
Don't let them.
When machines are replaced (either because of disaster or because of planned replacements), reduce the size of their primary partition to 512MB or something else ridiculously small, just enough to hold the OS and any other required business apps.
Then give them a place on the server to put stuff. As someone else already suggested, make their My Documents folders and other such stuff exist on the server.
Sig? What sig? Do I have to have a sig!?!?
We have samba running on Solaris 7. All of the users run various flavors of Windows. They all authenticate against the Samba server. Every friday we have them backup their files to the samba server. Its not the best in the world, but we have them use MS Backup (it comes with win 95, 98, etc...) and backup their stuff to a backup directory under their home directory. Then we have DAT DD4 tape backup drive backup the entire server every friday using tar. So far its saved us quite a few times.
If you need any help/advice then contact me.
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
Set up a server. All data gets stored on the server. Server has hardware RAID and daily backup.
Once the server is running, go to each machine and move all of the data to the server. Make sure you inform every single employee that data is to be stored on the server. Failure to follow that simple rule will result in administrative action. Put it in the company manual, and have them sign a statement that says they have been informed of the new policy. Make sure your new policy contains rules about moving and deleting files. Heck, don't just make it policy, make it part of the security settings. Don't let users delete files or move entire directory trees.
You'll still lose data when people ignore the rules but they you get to beat them.
Dear Slashdot:
I have this horse. I've tried everything. Hoof massages, Pur commercials, desert heat, prancing ponies, sweet talking...but the damn thing just won't drink! What gives!?
Sincerely,
Steve, Stupid Rhetorical Questions Dept
120 characters isn't enough to explain it.
I created a backup system for a small company I worked at on my own initiative. I used Retrospect (Dantz) to write DAT tapes.
1) Daily incremental backups
2) Weekly FULL backups
The weekly tapes were stored offsite.
If you're running a windows network, go get 2000 server or something and set up a domain for your users. login/passwd authentication, and you can export user home dirs off of the server's disks as shares on each workstation PC. Then train everyone to treat that drive (home folder mapped to a drive via login script) as their My Docs folder, and just save all your work there. After that, all you have to do is run a nightly backup of your domain controller, and your entire network's work is safe.
Its simple to backup 98/NT/2000/XP from one place. Just setup a machine with a tape drive, and copy of ArcServe IT (I think they renamed it BrightStor), and all you need is administrator/priviledged user logins to the machines. Then you can administer backup jobs from there, and even encrypt the data on the tapes. Easy to use, and it "relatively" cheap (~$400.00 depending on support/upgrades). http://www.cdw.com/shop/search/results.asp?key=Bri ghtStor
2) PC must be left on and connected to the network at all times
These are easy to enforce, and at least around here it is explicit in the employee manual that failure to follow them is a dismissable offense.
Once you get this far, all you need is the network compatible backup utility of your choice (we use Iomega Peerless drives). Pretty painless in our small office...
Add to this an effecient backup routine for the server (choose your backup software, make sure you are religious about backup.
Evil ZEN Scientist
Workstation backups plain and simply do not work. The best answer to this situation is to get a file server, create a home directory on the server for each user. Then, redirect the MyDocuments directory of each user to point to the home directory on the server. Most of the users will be completely unaware of the change, as they will be saving to the same default location the majority of the time.. and their information will be backed up.
Then why don't you simply move the user's home directory over to the server and mount it at startup. Then you mount the OS partition read-only so they can't go and mess up your plans. Oh, that's right. Windows needs the OS to be mounted read/write so it can write data to its root partition. Never mind.
I guess the answer is to trust that people will voluntarily mount a Windows network share and voluntarily use that share for their data. Good luck!
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
Send out a document, get everyone to read it and sign it. Show them how to store their data in an area that will be backed up. Let them know that any data they do not store there will NOT be backed up. And let them know that when their hard drives crash, it is THEIR responsibility if they have lost any data.
Of course, you'll need management buy-in for this. I must say, though, that it is kind of a shame that Windows makes this difficult. At the university I attended, all the computing science machines mounted their home directories from one of several file servers. Those file servers were religiously backed up and so the loss of any individual workstation was entirely unimportant.
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
I ran a small consulting business for five years. We did training and also systems integration mostly for law firms.
The setup I used both internally and for customers was to use roaming profiles in NT with the user's home directory residing on the file server. I would set up the office applications to default save into the home directory or a folder under the home directory. I would also set up a "Company" directory where company files were saved. The structure of the company directory would vary based on the customer.
To really get your point across "Upgrade" a couple of PCs with no warning. If the user has not circumvented the environment they just login and have all their stuff - which is the big benefit. After the first couple of users everyone gets with the program quickly.
Then you can just back up your server which you should be doing anyway.
Ideas are easy - Implementation...
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise. -Fight Club
You could do a demonstration. Remove 2 or 3 harddrives and "Pretend" they were stuffed. Leave it for the reaction and then suggest a change. Nothing like a shock to get them thinking.
In our case we came up with ways to improve the workflow and reduce lost files. You have to make it simpler for them (And there will be ways).
We created a logical directory structure on our server that could accommodate all of our job and administration related files and a naming convention. eg 2962re03.doc is the 3rd report for job 2962 located in the path i:\jobfiles\isp\2900\2962\2962re03.doc
Additionally, I wrote some macros for MS Word so users could click the custom SAVEor OPEN button, enter the 4 digit job number in the Pop-Up box and it automatically browsed to the correct directory. No more tree browsing - Then we had complete buyin.
As we dealt fully with Job Numbers it became faster to open and save using the custom buttons than using word Open/Save.
Took a few brainstorming sessions and some sensible thinking but this eliminated the need to buy a File Documentation software install.
The weathers here - Wish you were beautiful
Having someone completely lose their data more or less just pisses them off. Where I work, somebody with too many priviledges deleted hundreds of hours of video from the main server. Was it backed up? Of course not. Did they implement a back up solution? Not yet. But the thing is, the video still existed on the original tapes. Many workers had to spend hours and hours reconverting all of the movies. I think that will leave a bigger impression on them than losing a file or fearing that they will lose everything.
You can't force them to back up their systems, so store all important data on yours, and back it up. Give all of them Web TVs since they probably just send e-mail and surf the web anyway. They won't be able to screw those up so easily.
How ya like dat?
As any true administrator knows, anytime you can automate something and eliminate the chance of user error, do it. What you need is a fully automated backup system. There is an open-source one availible, that the last time I used it was extremely reliable, and did it's thing without getting in anyone's way.
It's called Amanda developed by the University of Maryland, and very slowly evolving it works well. The only problem is that setup is a true bitch. It's as bad as sendmail, but don't worry, because after you set it up, you can totally forget about it as it just goes about it's business and sends you emails telling you how swell everything is (or isn't).
Use it, don't let user error destroy your backups.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/amanda-win32/
Free backups, as long as you have a tape drive and backup server of some sort.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Considering how hectic things are going, I'm sure a call to your local BSA hit squad would guarantee a quick response to all your backup software needs and more! They will insure a plan that you have plenty of boxed software with licenses at each computer. Problems enforcing backups? No problem, the BSA will come in with police, search warrants, complete with guns and make sure every computer is up to par with standards!
Call your friendly BSA today for a complete backup audit! Vaseline(tm) optional.
It all comes down to who wants to spend money. You'll have to put together one of two solutions:
1) Set up network drives for users (may need more space) and have Human Resources institute a training program for those on staff and to train the new folks on policy/procedure. Once each course is done, folks then sign a form stating to the company that they understand that they have an obligation to back up data via the methods chosen and will do their part.
2) Set up a very large backup server, purchase an Enterprise class backup software solution ( Veritas NetBackup Datacenter or the like), install clients on all desktops and back them up. No training of end user required.
You choose.. both can be costly.. but 1) is much less costly all around.
(1st sig) If this were a snappy sig, you'd be reading it right now. (2nd sig) I'm a karma whore. >Insert FUD here
Management Perspective
Assuming you have done what you need to do with the client Stations and the servers.
The next most important is to make sure you management who ever there are understand the business ramifactions of data backup. I spent hours in offices explaining to managers the critical nature of backups in some cases to no evail. Additionally have a policy created run by your HR and legal departments and have it included in the Employee handbook or at the very least the new employee oreitation. In Corporate America today you can not do enough to cover your ass.
Create a home share on the network named the same as their logon name (/home/logonname is standard in Samba) In their login script put the following:
/m /y /s "c:\My Documents" "\\orion\%bkname%\My Documents\"
/My Documents).
net use u: "\\orion\%bkname%"
xcopy
In their autoexec.bat put:
set bkname=logonname whatever the logon name is.
Make sure they set all their applications to store data under the My Documents directory.
Now, whenever they logon, the xcopy will copy only the changed data up to their network home directory. (The first time it will copy the entire
MC neodigita
I would advise against a waiver. Its likely the users would complain to this guy's boss and get him trouble. Users=lusers and they want to have someone to point there fingers at when things fail. They want there problems solved by someone else and if shit happens THEN ITS THE HELP DESK GUYS FAULT AND IF HE/SHE CAN"T GET IT BACK THEN FIRE THEM! I use to do helpdesk and it was the shortest job I have ever had. The network goes down due to a miss configured router=my fault, user unplugs lan hub underneath desk for a lamp causes her boss to unaccess her mission critical project due in 1 hour=my fault, user's hard drive fails and she never backs it up and co-worker screws up backups= my fault and she calls my bosses boss and gets me fired even though I didn't fuck with the server tapes! This happened 2 years ago and I am still very angry over this because I couldn't fin another IT job before the .bomb .
:-)
Anyway here is a more non confrontational method. Just setup a user policy and have it downloaded automatically when each user logs in. In that policy map the users default drive on the server. Make sure the users name is on each subfolder on the servers main backup folder. This will make a big difference to clueless lusers when they see there name on a folder that ms-word tries to automatically save in. You may want to put a greeting pop up message in their profile when each user logs in and telling them to save there files with the directory with there name on it. THen send an email out to everyone and warn them that hard drives tend to fail and just tell them to save all their work with the folder with their name on it. Sounds simple. right?
The program to do this is called poledit and its on the windows cd. To have the profile downloaded automatically you need to create the profiles and then go to user manager and setup it up to download automatically when each user logs in. This is what I would do. If shit hits the fan you can tell management what you did with the pop-up messages, the email's and the profiles and that it was the users fault. With all of these things combined, the blame factor will move away from you and towards the user. Unless of course the server dies.
But I advise not to have users sign anything. It makes them angry and uncomfortable and they could get you in trouble. Remember that IT is customer service just like any entry level job. The customer is always first and its your job and not there's to make sure the data is backed up.
http://saveie6.com/
First, write a policy for users to follow (not more than a page), get your boss to sign it, and then distribute copies. This tells everyone that the boss is behind this. If your boss does not have line authority over the people in question then get someone who does.
Second, get your boss's approval for a half hour tutorial for all staff on the subject, attendance mandatory for all users including him/herself. Get the boss to start with a brief repeat of the disaster story, then hand over to you (write the boss a script if necessary). Tell people why they need to do it and what it is they need to do, but obviously don't go into techie detail. Also emphasise that unsafe behaviour is letting the team down: its not just your work at risk, its everyones.
Its your responsibility to determine policy, configure machines, tell people what to do, monitor progress, and report to your boss. This can and should include saying that certain users are refusing to following departmental policy. Its then his/her job to take things further, upt to and including disciplinary action if necessary. Its not likely to be necessary: few people are that boneheaded.
Good luck. Culture change is hard, but its one of the most valuable things you can do.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
This story reminds me of my earlier years as a indy IT contractor...
One of my first customers was a NAACP trial lawer. Every day one of his jeloppy win95 machines would take a shit, and every day I would fix it. I would constantly remind him how he needed NT workstation instead of 95.
When it came time for billing we would always go around in the same circle, "Now Wobbert (he had the elmer fudd ebonic accent) Why am I gettin chwarged 5 times for the same fix?"
To which I would respond, "Because you broke it 5 times!"
Then his killer statement would come, "Well then shouldn't you have fixed it right the first time so it wouldn't break again?"
To which I would go into why 95 was a POS and NT4.0 was alot better. Then we would go into costs and I would show him how his long term maintenence cost would drop if he made the switch. It never really registered with him though.
I also made the pitch to him about having a centralized server for his employee's to store data on. He just could not understand that this computer wasn't for the employee's to use nilly willy as they pleased.
I feel for you man, just run while you still have some sanity left.
But to anwser you, since you apparently dont know anything, http://veritas.com/. But most importantly get a LART. And a goddamm clue.
In my previous job, I had a similar situation. We had no admins, I doubled up as the unofficial sysadmin for the company. All the users ran Win98. The solution I came up with was to use a linux server with a large enough harddrive for file sharing, and setup up the linux box as a PDC using samba.
The main trick is to replace their "My Documents" folder to point to their personal directory on the file server. Remind the users to store all their files in that folder, and that should take care of backup issues, since many ppl do that already. Just ensure you have a good backup method for the file server. I don't recommend a CD Burner =) Have the company go out and get a tape backup.
Overall it shouldn't be too complez to setup, just a bit time consuming to setup/test. Have fun.
Create network shares on the server, and then make your hdd's read only so the lusers are forced to use them. Yes, it can be done, even on modern machines.
"To blow recursion, you must first blow recus
I second this. I have been using retrospect since it was a mac only product and it has always been solid.
I just sent them an email asking them to hurry up the linux client. I hope everyone else who uses it does the same.
Make them all save to shares on the NT 4 file server. Make this easy by mounting their share as a network drive (not at all hard to do) and backing up the file server regularly. It's definitely worth your while to put a tape drive on that one machine. The alternative is a windows NT logon script that copies the full contents of their My Documents folder to the file server, but if you make it that transparent, they might break it without realizing it, or fill up the file server.
Getting users to make multiple copies has a tendency to confuse them, because they can accidentally do things like accidentally copy an old version over the new version, but most of them seem to be able to handle "save this here". You can even tape it to the bottoms of their monitors. Then you just have one backup to make.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
You can't expect anyone to go out of their way to do anything. Ever.We've got a network of many type of OS's. Our backup server is 2k. The particular solution we have implemented is to set up a general client/task/whatever folder on the backup server and share that. Then on all of the desktop stations, just map the drive (Or mount it if it's *nix/mac), all your users will have to do is save to their "local folder." The idea is to make it as seamless as possible. We all know that there is too much going on in the day to click one more time to prevent something that "isn't going to happen to me," but if you make it easy to do, your users will have to *try* to not save their documents properly.
I have been using this device for more that a year now and it works like a charm. Among other goodies it comes with a cd-rw drive and allows you to make a recovery cd set of any computer protected by the device. I also allows data rollback and backing up files as soon as the user logs on the network/ dial-up or set up your own schedule.
It is a pitty that HP discontinued this product.
"In God we trust, all others must bring data" - W. Edwards Deming
Has anyone tried Tivoli Storage Manager in a senario like this?
We use TSM on our servers and are considering using it on a few key workstations.
The only problem may be that it may cost too much for sucha small implementation.
I'm in a similar situation at the library where i work. All the staff here except me run variants of Windows on their desktops. I installed a program called taskzip (do a google search to find it) on the clients and scheduled it to run at 02:00 when no one is around. Taskzip connects to a file server (running Samba) and creates a zip file of all the user's important files. Several people are running Windows 2000 which makes it really easy to configure taskzip since all their files are in "\Documents and Settings". I think taskzip is freeware. It works well for us. If your staff can't be trained to leave their computers on at night for the backup job to run, then in the BIOS set the machine to automatically boot just before the backup. If the BIOS isn't that advanced... then i'm out of ideas and someone else will have to suggest something. Perhaps set up taskzip to run on boot or shutdown or at lunch break or something.
----- "I'm still sane on three planets and two moons."
I know that plugging commercial products can be hearasy on slashdot but I would suggest that you talk to VERITAS about their NetBackup Professional application. http://www.veritas.com/products/category/ProductDe tail.jhtml?productId=nbupro&_requestid=80144
-- Mache
If you have lost six years of data already, people are motivated and understand the issue. That's good--a huge obstable has been removed.
No solution that you come up with will work without training. If it's at all possible, try to sit down with everybody and show them how it works. Help them create files or folders or whatever in any shares that they have set up. Create shortcuts. Answer questions. Repeat as necessary. It really only takes 5 - 15 minutes at every desk.
I try to take people to the closet and show them the file server and the tape backup so that they have a picture of the share as something other than an icon on their screen.
Here's training (in my experience) that doesn't work well with non-technical users: sending e-mail explaining how your system works. Drawing pictures on a whiteboard. Using a projector to show people basic actions. Successful training requires the user to get the mouse in their hands, trying while you watch. Try not to grit your teeth if you can help it.
If you don't have time or resources to do this all yourself, figure out who knows what they're doing (it isn't hard) and ask them to help spread the love.
Just give them all etcha-sketches. It would be cheaper and save you a lot of trouble.
Doesn't sound like they do anything important, anyway... >:)
www.dedserius.com
VB != VisualBasic
First thing is to make sure management understands the magnitude of the problem. Once they are on board, you need to get a policy approved that has some teeth.
Something along the lines of NO COMPANY DATA STORED ON LOCAL HARDDRIVES. Period. Put sanctions in there. Firing on second offence, depending on the magnitude of the loss, is what we had at my last job.
Make them use mapped network drives for everything. We used H: for home directories and P: for the user-public directories. Get a time-table for moving over existing data.
Get a good backup drive, like a DLT or DAT autochanger from HP. Grok backup systems. GFS (Grandfather, Father, Son) is a real good one.
Once you choose a backup system, make sure you get the annual budget approved for media. You DO NOT reuse tapes. bad habit. Also, price an off-site storage facility that does weekly pickup.
Educate the end users. Send out a company-wide e-mail with the new policy and make sure it is brought up at the next "everyone" meeting. Make sure it is part of the new-hire orientation.
Then, you will need to create a chart of end-users that you can check off as you manually go around making sure drives are clean.
You will need to periodically check to make sure there are no repeat violators. This is what the chart is for.
I hope you have balls, because some of the worst offenders will be management. You'll need to give them a deadline -- after which point you'll wipe or reimage their drive. Follow thru.
While you're at it, look into Norton Ghost so you can create images of each system that can be pushed out from the server if necessary. Also make sure there is anti-virus software on each machine and you have a central definitions distribution point (like an NT server). Update definitions no later than once a week.
Don't even THINK about trying to backup each individual harddrive. It'll never work.
Welcome to Hell.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I have to agree, set their 'My Documents' to a netshare thats backed (I use U: for 'You' or 'User ;-) drive home if it not on there (if only a copy) then any loss is their responcibility.
.ADM template files, the basic 'common.adm' should be a good starter.
.adm files for other stuff (be carefull some overlap) and you can make ur own.
A lot of things like word can be set to save a backup similtaneously, when u save your working copy
If you dont know, I suggest you look for a prog on ur windows CD called 'poledit' or policy editor and some starter
Now crate a 'config.pol' file you can make easy changes to systems setting like Shell Folders (ie where my documents is) and not need to learn about/how the windows registry works or laid out.
(the template files provide the abstraction)
Now to get the work station to load it. If they already have to login to a NT Domain, create a share called 'NETLOGON' and place 'config.pol' in their next time the logon their work station will load the policy. If not put it on a share and go around each machine with poledit open their registry with it, and change the Update Path for the machine to look at the location of ur config.pol
This is a very power full tool to change/enforce settings on work station, you can overide/set defaults for every thing. Their other
*disclaimer I have not done any of this windows configuration for a long time (switched to linux) and so some names and info maybe out of date or plain wrong, but it should point u in the right direction. oh and be careful being MS once you set a policy it is sometimes hard to undo, you can still change it, but its hard to go back to the true (original/cryptic?) defaults.
Large, because your backing up everything. Also... when you have to restore a certain file for a user, you'll have to hunt around for it in all the various backups. Great fun if your users move around a lot (hot desking). Often, it is not a machine you need to resture, but documents or even just a single document for a user.
Much better to have all users save documents in a network drive, and back that drive up. This is what most companies do. Experience tells us that users do not need much encouragements or instructions to make the use the networked drive.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
First... show your financial people what it would cost to run backups of all the PCs... cost of a tape library, a year's worth of tapes, software, etc. They'll make the decision for you, and you won't have to go that route. And it will absolve you of blame if data gets lost from PC's.
Next, make sure each user has a home directory on the server, and that it gets mapped as a drive. Make it easy for them, in other words.
Then, you can try to implement a policy that all data must be stored on the server. But policies don't always fly, especially in small organizations.
If that doesn't work, you can "suggest" it: Tell them that it's safe on the server, and that it's backed up, and if they don't want to risk doing their work all over again, they'll save their work there. If you're not getting cooperation, reinstall somebody's sytem, do your best to save all their data, but maybe "lose" something unimportant... their bookmarks or whatever. That will help drive the point home. I've had pretty good luck with this approach, you just have to send frequent friendly reminders. The friendlier and funnier the reminders are, the more effective. If you can't come up with at least one good data loss joke every couple of weeks, then you're not qualified to be a sysadmin.
Let your main office know to send someone out with knowledge and stop being cheap. Why did you volunteer for this with no experience. Disaster Systems, by their very nature, can be complicated and backing up more then one system over a network is not something you can be taught on /. . If I were you I would distance myself from this job. You will be in the hotseat next time this fails and based on your experience level I am sure it will. Outsource or have an internal guy brought in. Spend the money or do the time!
yeah theres probably a lot of people who are going o talk about using terminals switching to linux or some other BS the BEST way for your situation would be to get a storage server in-house and have everyone copy there stuff to it. ie: make a computer with a shitload of storage space and stick it in a closet - connect it to the network and map the drive as "shared" or "backup" with every employee having there own folder - then on a weekend where the employees are out set there windows systems to backup to this drive (in there dessignated folder) every 1st and 3rd saturday (insert day no one comes in) you could have this implemented within a week if you go about it right.
Ave Molech Setting
Comment removed based on user account deletion
-Setup a Ghost server to totally backup each machine.
-Force the use of a document management solution, beyond a simple shared drive; something like Xerox Docushare.
-Start using collaboration software like eRoom or Macromedia Sitespring software.
-Hire a guy like me to build a real intranet for your team.
-Plenty of other ideas/solutions out there.
I can't believe this is even a serious question anymore. What a sorry IT world we live in.
Create a folder named "My Documents" in each server "home" directory (in Alice's and Bob's, etc)Then remove the My Documents folder in the root drive of the Win9x machines (and the c:\documents and settings\[username] directory on NT/2000). Now create a shortcut named "My Documents" in the place of the ones you just removed and have it point to the ones on the server. Make the shortcut "Read Only" (Right Click on the shortcut | choose Poperties | In the resulting dialog, choose the General tab and click the Read Only attribute). This should prevent any software from overwriting it.
The only rule that you have to make then is that users save everything to their "My Documents" folder which will actually force everything to be saved on the server in thier home directories on the server. This shouldn't be too difficult as most software for windows that creates stuff will set "My Documents" as the main save location anyway.
Now... run backups on the server. Relatively little effort is required.
The second, more cumbersome option is to write a script that is loaded onto each machine (grab a copy of Active State Perl for this... it is free). This script would connect to a remote server on a timed basis (once every couple of hours) and upload the contents of specific directories (that the staff would have to be told to use... My Documents comes to mind). You could also search the drive for specific extensions (based on the applications that you use) like .doc and .jpg and back those up for good measure (in case the users are not saving in the proper places). Then back up the server.
The drawback is that you would have to write the script and maintain it (a lot of effort on your part if you don't know Perl already... relatively little if you already know it at least a bit). The benefit is that you can possibly catch files stored in the wrong places.
The third option is to use a 3rd party product like IBM's Tivoli which uses a client side program to back up those systems in its backup routine. The upsides are easier managment and fine grained control of backups. The downsides are increased administration duties, expense, and finding a solution that works for every platform in your organization.
Good Luck.
Why go through the hassel of setting up a backup system on each desktop? Not only will is take a while to setup, but the upkeep will also tie up a lot of time.
Just setup the workstations to use files on the server and then backup the files on the server. Duh!
Backup 1 server = easy
Backup 50 workstations = pain in ass
Plus it will be cheaper to implement!
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
One idea is to tie this into Novell's iFolder idea. The concept is you install a small client onto someone's computer, then "tag" which directories you want synched up with the users home director on the server (such as My Documents, etc).
Every time a file on either the server side or the workstation side updates, the client makes the same changes (note: changes, not the entire file, so if you change 1 sentance on a 30 MB document, you only change the few bytes of code).
We're going to try this out at my Day job for our Laptop user types, but so far, it's looking cool. Novell has mentioned future support for OS X (which I don't believe, but I'm an eternally hoping idiot.)
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
Yes, I admit to doing tech support for a living. I even admit to liking it. Anyway...
Suppose you have the ultimate app, the best backup scheme ever thought of or implemented, smart users who completely agree and don't get in the way, and everything is backed up every single night. Then you have a problem and you need to restore, but when you go to do it the backup isn't good. It happens, and has happened to quite a number of poor souls I've had to talk though putting their very expensive Xnix server back into operation after this very thing happened to them. The moral of the story is: Don't believe that because you have a backup that the backup is good. CHECK IT. And because it was good 6 months ago, it may not be good today. CHECK IT AGAIN.
Good luck!
"Suppose you were an idiot..... And suppose you were a member of Congress... But I repeate myself."
and here comes a great idea from a helpdesk boy with hubs under the desks, what a joke
Here is what you need to do...
1.) Buy a new machine with a IDE Raid card, tape backup, and a high quality UPS. Set the machine up with RAID 5.
2.) Put all your company's data on the new machine and force people to access all info over the network.
3.) Run a tape backup every night.
Assuming your company is relatively small, the server will be pretty inexpensive compared to the information you've already lost.
You're biggest challenge will be to enforce the use of the network drive. Tell everyone they will be fired if company information is found on their local hard drives.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The ONLY way is to put them on a LAN, put a central file server as a shared service with a CVS with copy-out (and it labels the files as .dontsave,) check-out and check-in, and tell them that only the shared drive is backed up and has to be kept virus-free and porn-free.
:-).
Tell them their systems can die at any time and they're out a limb for whatever was on there. You don't care, nor does the company. There is no money for data recovery. If their machine dies, its one a one way trip to the toxic waste dump.
Set up a Linux box with a big hard drive (120GB,) a tape drive and a CD-RW burner with plenty of tapes and CD-RWs. Use some form of CVS with check-out, check-in and versioning. You'll be able to save everything that's worth saving and turf the rest.
If you want them to get the point, screw around with the power supply connections every now and then on random machines and random users.
Take the box out, scrub the case clean (repaint a case and keep it handy for exchanging is a good trick,) and put the fear of God into 'em every now and then.
The ones who have been using the shared drive won't care and will make do with whatever you bring'em on the trolley in about ten minutes (just long enough to change the case
The slatterns who didn't use the server will whine and bitch and you just tell 'em to wait a couple of hours or days while you TRY to recover their data.
The server doesn't even need a monitor. Run it headless remote and admin it from your own machine.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I use Retrospect. It backs up all flavors of Windows and Macs on any media you can throw at it. It is as fast, unobtrusive, and easily scriptable as backup could be. It makes sequential backups at a schedule you set and can even backup computers that aren't on the network 24/7. Still no *nix support, but I hear it is on the way.
http://www.dantz.com/
At my last employer, I had a similar problem-all of my group knew HOW to use a computer, but not HOW to (a) keep 'em clean or (b) backed up.
I was given an NT4 server for an Oracle database. I had to learn how to install Oracle and transfer a Ingres database from a VAXcluster to an NT machine. So I told the PC guys I needed a backup app. They gave me Veritas.
Next, I set up a client on each user's machine and told them they had to leave the machine on every night so I could perform "maintenance'.
I did a full backup of each machine (10 total). 2 machines had a 4GB HD, the rest had 20GB HD's. Using Veritas, I backed up their systems to 4mm tapes.
And an incremental backup the rest of the week.
Then I set up a "data source" for all of the developer's source code and help files on the server. It was fairly easy to convince them that the data would be backed up daily should they accidently delete it.
Using 120m tapes it was fairly simple to back things up. The users' data was backed up in full one night, incrementally the rest of the time.
Hope this helps.
The simplest windows backup software I have used is BackupExec. Which can backup multiple systems from a central site without end-user intervention. To make things even easier create a file share on the server and require all data to be saved there (i imagine you are running a raid array or some other kind of fault tolerance). The biggest problem I currently face is the increasing size on desktop hard drives allows more to be saved on the local PC. If staging new systems consider only formatting the space that is actually needed instead of the entire drive to force the user to save data to a file server
After many years of painfull experience, I have only one suggestion:
**** NEVER EVER UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES BACKUP WORKSTATIONS ****
Got my point?
Instead, go out and buy a cheap server. You can get a AtlonXP 1800 w/ 512MB of RAM and 100 GB of disk for around 200-400 dollors if you put it together yourself. From there map all drives. If you ever get stuck in a situation where you back up the PC's
A) It will get difficult to wean users off of later.
B) Builds bad saving practice. To comply with document policies, you really must centralize where your documents are.
C) Backup software tends to fail/hide/be to verbose when too many boxes are used.
If you absolutly have to backup workstations, look at network backup products like Veritas or Seagate software (err. they may have sent the product to some other company). Ask a user explicitly for a single directory to backup.
For servers, a image level backup is always a good idea. It tends to be the different between 3-4 hours recovery time and 12-24 hours.
Anyways, that's my advice.
Anyway, after I setup a simple Windows network, I insisted that they start using a WYSIWYG word processor (Microsoft Word 95). Before Windows 95, the office people used a DOS text editor to create documents. (I kid you not). The office loved the fact that we could now create professional documents. The main problem was document management. I kept on getting requests to search for lost files. It was clear that users were placing files in different directories throughout the network. There was no centralized location to place documents. So, I end up creating a file share on one of the computers for a rudimentary file storage area. All goes well until the first virus plagued the network.
This virus basically wiped out all of the important documents in our network. There was no backups, and even the floppy copies were infected. The division manager asked why this happened. I told him: "I am not qualified to be a system administrator. You need to hire one. You also need to put more money into your IT budget. We could not afford the licenses for virus scanners." Man, that was pathetic.
To this day, some other joe at that company is the "computer guy". I learned a lot:
I just got sick of it. I left that company in 1998. I was not going to be responsible their lack of good judgement. Today, I am no longer in fire protection engineering. I was that disgruntled.
If this sounds like you, then your SOL. If you are in a good position to make recommendations, then you should recommend to hire a couple of good system administrators.
Coderz 4 Life
My advice seems to be about the same as everyone else...
1) Create User and Profile folders on the file server - map thier "My Docs" and "Office" apps defaults to the new shares - If you're not using a domain you can just create user accounts on the file server that have the same uid/pw combo as they use on their own PCs. Remember to limit their access.
2) Enable roaming profiles. While this is a bit of work to set up, it will capture all of thier desktop info onto the server in the "Profile" or "My Docs" folder - this is configurable for NT/2K; 98 will go to "the "My Docs" and doesn't roam to other PCs. Point is you then can back-up not just docks, but also thier desktop.
3) Turn the Internet Explorer cache down to 1 MB on each user. Otherwise you'll back up 100's of MB of temp Internet files.
4) Copy the profiles from the desktops. Easy for NT/2K - use the user profiles appelet under "My Computer". Win98 - use the control panel.
5) Install (or have installed) a tape backup into the server.
6) Use the NT/2K backup utility or purchase an off the shelf product - but the NT utility is an inexpensive way to get something rolling.
While the process may seem more involved than trying to back up workstations, it isn't. In the long run this is will also save you lots of time. User desktops and data will then be fully recoverable in the event of problem. Oh, one further note - for the roaming profiles to be truly effective, your users will need to log out of their PCs every night. Roaming profiles get written to the server as the user logs off of thier workstation.
Hope this helps.
If not already being done, set things up so that the data that needs backed up is on a network server. Network access of the local drives is not as good, particularly if any users turn their computers off at night. Identify what directories need to be backed up and overnight have an automatic program copy them completely, copying to a completely different server or at least a different hard drive (compressing at this step can save you a lot of storage space). Also identify any company data (that might not be in any user account) that needs the same treatment and copy the databases in the same way. Since you indicated you are in a satellite office, you might even consider sending a copy of your archive to the main office. (I used to back up daily but would send a copy of key databases to the main office once a week over a 56k connection. With today's connection speeds I would be doing it daily.) If there's a privacy issue here, the data can be encrypted with only two people at your satellite office having the key, but it's still a handy way to get a copy off-site. Be sure this backup gets done and that if the automatic procedure fails that you know about it; either have it send you e-mail on success or have another program confirm success and alert you on failure (obviously the second option should not be run automatically from the same system you run the first one on, it could be run on your on system as a log-in task for example).
I didn't suggest writing the data directly to back-up media because in my experience this frequently fails and causes backups to not be made. Once you have a good backup you can copy the files to CDR or tape yourself (I prefer CDR or other media like a swapable hard drive where I can access individual files directly over tape; I've had too many cases where I couldn't get what I needed off the tape when the time came). If you have a lot of data, try to plan your backup device so that everything will fit on one piece of media without swaps, swaps complicate the backups and soon they are done less and less frequently. If you do it right you can come in each day and write the backup to CDR while you're getting your first cup of coffee.
Mirrored drives are great protection against hardware failures and with IDE RAID controllers on the motherboards, hard to justify not using in a file server. These will only protect you from a hard drive failure though, not from files being deleted by the user or a virus or other problems, so don't count on them as any form of backup.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
My wife is in a similar situation where she works. Any attempt to automate the process resulted in people finding some way of avoiding backup. Sometimes it was unintentional, other times it was purposeful. It was complicated by many people working on the road via laptop & dial-up connections.
She finally resorted to going in early and manually backing up every machine periodically. She's now started to put automated software back on -- checks every machine and either verifies that the auto backup worked or starts it manually.
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." --Napoleon Bonaparte
I work in a medium sized company where the majority of our users write their data to a network share provided by a samba server. It's a simple solution where there is one public directory, which is mapped as a consisitent drive letter under windows from machine to machine. I do a nightly backup of the public drive via cron in case anybody gets stupid and deletes the entire directory. None of the data being written there is that important, so security isn't really an issue. It just provides a convienent place for people to save files that can be accessed from any workstation in the lab.
A few computers in the lab do have critical data on them. For those, I make their important directories available via windows file sharing, and mount them on our linux backup server using smbmount. Those directories are rsynced to continually backed up master directories nightly, and then the entire backup server is backed up to tape. All in all, it's a pretty simple solution, but it works fine for our intents and purposes, and it's saved my ass more than once!
A musician without the RIAA, is like a fish without a bicycle.
Tivoli Storage Manager
I would have to agree too. The whole reason to become a sysadim is to read other's e-mails. Then pass it on to the boss so they can be fired, or pass it back to the user to blackmail them. It is your call. It is justification for all the crap you have to put up with.
Being a sysadmin who always gets stuck specializing in backups, I recommend the following solution for a (relatively) low budget backup solution on Windows. Please note that this system ignores trying to get the users to do this themselves, because users will never do anything right.
1- Get all users off of Windows 98 and onto Windows 2000. Do NOT go to Windows XP. Having all your systems on one OS will make troubleshooting backup (Among others.) problems much easier, and having the systems on a better OS will help ensure that backups actually run right.
2- Get all of the systems on a Windows 2000 domain on which they have NO administrative privileges. This keeps users from screwing around with backup software and options.
3- Buy Veritas Backup Exec as well as the open file option (~$900 USD).Read the manual before you use it. If the company to spring for training, get trained. Set it up a server that won't mind the extra load.
You may notice that other companies sell other backup solutions. In a Windows environment, stick with Veritas. Veritas wrote the backup software built into Windows. Veritas works with Microsoft to make their product work well with Windows. Veritas also has what is, IMHO, some of the best software support out there.
4- First thing every morning, grab a cup of coffe and go through last night's backup logs. Keep a written journal of all failures and irregularities (A nice spreadsheet is userful as well.). This will help track errors.
5- Do test restores often! You don't want to do all this and find out that you cannot restore data properly!
6- Store backup tapes off site! Find out if Iron Mountain has a facility nearby and if so, USE IT. 99% (Yes, 99%!) of all lost data is caused by fires. Earthquakes and floods are not far behind. Nothing will wipe out a small site like a big fire that takes backup tapes with it.
7- Put together a good disaster recovery plan and try it out on test machines once a year or so. Aside from keeping you ready for a disaster (Imagine if you had been a sysadmin in the World Trade center, survived the disaster, kept fine backups off-site, but had no idea how to bring the systems back up from nothing but tapes!), it will keep you ready for small disasters (ie your domain controller's raid array croaks and corrupts all the disks on the way to the graveyard.) as well.
Hope this helps. And remember, most importantly - users are stupid assholes. The reason you get paid to dick around with computers all day is because users are stupid assholes, and can't use a computer without fucking things up. Making them backing up data is not your job; backing it up no matter what they think is!
I used to take my dead drives apart (poor free-air circulation killed four one summer,) and hang them from my cubicle wall.
Little shiny reminders to people who walked past my desk of the evenescence of things.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
The first company I worked for had the same feeling as you're currently describing. There was a network, but it was loosely connecting a bunch of Win95 boxes. The standard policy was to provide a central drive where all data was saved to. It had the notion of a "home directory" in Unix land, but it was only for Data.
Then, because everyone's T: drive pointed to the same big server drive, it was easily backed up nightly.
We received monthly warnings that anything stored locally wasn't backed up, and a few dead Win95 disks and people stopped saving important stuff to the C: drive.
Nice idea, but 4 gig drives suck.
I'd suggest a variation; reformat their drives with a fairly small primary partition. That way you'll get the speed of a modern drive with the same effect.
Then, once people are used to saving their data on the network drive, you can create a secondary partition with an odd drive assignment for "personal use".
Point My Documents to their home directory on a file server. Don't have a file server? Get one. It doesn't have to be fancy. Configure apps to save to My Documents by default (most do). Send out emails regularly about how great it is to save to My Documents. Give horror stories about people who didn't. Give happy stories about people who did.
Users will learn. They don't need to know what a server is either. My Documents is "on the Desktop" and makes total sense.
My Karma was at 49, then they switched to words. All that work for nothing!
Say "For security and budgetary ( I think I made up a word) reasons we'll be removing some of your larger hard drives and replacing them with smaller ones. Please keep all sensitive data on the network shared drive."
I try to make it as easy as I can for stupid users. I map their user directory on a samba server as a local drive on their workstation, then point My Documents to it. I just tell them to save everything critical to My Documents, then it's backed up every time the server is.
Deep Freeze reimages the hard drive to an older state on every startup(except when disabled). It is quick, and would teach the users to always hold on to their data, knowing that it wouldn't be there after a restart. It forces backups, and also keeps your machines in a good condition.(They won't be able to install anything harmful either, since it will be erased after the next restart.)
I am the network administrator for a small R&D company with approximately 50 workstations.
/home/backups directory, and if it exists, it puts the instructions in the login script to do a rsync backup. Otherwise, it looks for a "flag" file that matches - in /home/backups/flags, and if it is there, it puts in the login script to connect to the root of the backups share and make a directory - and just do a straight XCOPY of the C:\DATA directory to the server. After the inital backup is completed, the next time they log in they will use rsync to synchronize the two.
I started almost one year ago and the way backups were done before was horrible. Someone from IT would go around with a tape drive and backup up EACH AND EVERY workstation manually. And they would backup EVERYTHING, which obviously includes a lot of redundant data (operating system files, program files, etc.).
Anyways, since everyone logs into an NT domain now (thanks to Samba), I can put pretty much whatever I want into their login scripts. I've set it up so that once a day when they log into their workstation, all the data that is in C:\DATA gets rsync'd to a personal backup share on the server. The directory on the backup share is of the format -, which takes into account the fact that I COULD log in from someone else's computer and I don't want a backup to be done unless I'm logging in from my primary workstation.
Basically, I have it set up in the login script generation script so that it looks for the existance of a directory with the above format in the
It's actually not that difficult at all and was done completely with free software. All users have the ability to save documents to their local hard drives so they have quick access to their stuff, and if a hard drive dies, they lose AT MOST whatever they worked on that day. All the users have access to a personal 7-day rotating incremental backup (look on the rsync website for more info of how to do that) so if they accidently delete a file, they can get it back themselves without contacting me. If it's out of their rotating backup already, then I can pull it off the main server tapes (which gets a monthly full backup and daily incrementals).
I prefer this system rather than trying to teach all the users to save everything to the network. Especially with only 1 admin, if there was a problem with the network or the server, I don't want ALL the work in the entire company to grind to a halt. Of course, we're running FreeBSD so the uptime and stability of the server has been very commendable.
make a share on a network drive, and have it so that when a user logs on it goes to their folder on a network drive.
That is what I would suggest....
but what do I know?
It is actually the way a lot of large (and I mean 100,000 desktops large) companies essentially do it. Create one 'Build' and roll that out to users. All data (Lotus Notes data, word docs, etc) is stored on servers.
Then when Level 1 support can't fix the problem by doing a 3 finger salute (Ctrl-Alt-Del) then they simple redeploy the build.
/b
[Please type your sig here.]
When I arrived, most data files were kept on floppy disk. No backups, no nothing.
The most important thing is to get the owner / boss on your side. Make sire he / she understands why you;re doing what you're doing and will stone face anyone who complains. If you don't have authority to make the necessry changes and enact policy, then you should start looking for a new job NOW because some loudmouth luddite will get you fired for daring to change her / his work habbits in the name of data inergrity. I once had to host a two hour meeting defending the use of usernames and passwords on the network. If it hadn't happened less than 24 hours after a mjor data loss due to people having access they didn't need, I'd have either been out of a job or forced to set up a Novell server with NO usernames or passwords.
The most important thing is to make it clear that any data on the C: Drive is disposable. Network for work, C: for personal. I sent out a memo that used the phrase, "All data stored on your hard drive (C:) Drive is considered disposable. MIS will not attempt to recover lost data on hard drives and you will be held responsible for any lost data. Information on the H:, M: and U: Drives are backed up nightly and all files less than a month old can be recovered."
My backup really went back two months, but you have to pad this ort of thing or users freak.
I didn't have to cause a disaster. A consultatn had saddled us with a bunch of Compaq Presario systems, and it only took a couple months for everyone to have expereinced or hear about a major loss of data due to failing to keep files on the server.
This is where the boss' support is vital. When people complained, the first question the boss asked was "Was the file on your computer or the server." When the file was on their hard drive, THEY got reamed for the lost data.
There were a couple of times where the data recovery took longer than the user wanted, and I had to have the "Tape drives are slow, using faster media will cost $xxx. Sign this purchase order and recovering files people accidentally deleted will be much faster" conversation.
Good Luck, and keep in mind, this is largely a social issue. If you don't have the suits on your side, it's an uphill battle that will end in being blamed for causing problems, or bamed for lost data. Don't get caught in asitution where you have no authority, but have all the responsibility for bame. Without support from the higher ups, you are the data loss scapegoat.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
although you'll probably never see it this far down..
Install perl on every machine. then simply write a script that collect's all *.doc *.xls *.whatever files and plop's them on the server in a directory with that computer's name on it.
works great, and cince I have the script writtne a bit further It also Zip's them, and keeps 5 days worth of zip files in that directory.. now the server's backup system happily spools them to the DLT tape every night. between the 5 zip files and my tape rotation (5 daily tapes, 4 weekly tapes, 12 monthly tapes and stuff a yearly away every year.) you will have the ability to go back almost to anything.
the key is to automate the backup. users are way too stupid to do it. you have to do it for them...
Basically, think of your users as a bunch of mentially ill 5 year olds... you have to do the basic tasks for them every day for the rest of their lives.
The best thing to do is to get the Orielly book NT workstation administration.. It's awesome and tells you how to do the perl +windows intergration nicely.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
that is it basically impossible to back up and restore Windows users' data without working with whole-disk images. The registry, files strewn everywhere, who knows what else...
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Lemme guess - you've never had to ask someone for advice or help?
They only care about restores!!!
This is kinda off topic, but semi-related. Is anyone using a backup package that can do remote backups (via TCP/IP and a DSL or T1 connection) from a customer site to a central location? I've been experimenting around with a few FTP remote backup programs and the few that I've found to work aren't robust enough (don't run as a service, easy for a user to shut off, scheduling is not very good).
Basically I'm looking for a package to put on a clients server, select their folders they want backed up, and then have it run via their internet connetion to a central server here.
I'd suggest downloading the 30 day trial from their website and give it a shot. There's also versions for linux & netware.
Set each user up with a mapped drive that is mapped via a login script when they log into the network. Then reconfigure there My Documents folder to point to the mapped drive via the Properties page for it. It is easier to teach users to save there document to there My Documents folder than it is to teach them to back up every day/week. To the user it look like you are trying to make there life easier when in fact you are making your life easier. Since you are in a Windows only environment this should not be a problem. Also since the mapped drive is on the server the files will get backed up when ever the server backup runs.
"Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect." Linus Torvalds
Be very careful with poledit. Done improperly, it can lead to more headaches than it cures. A word to the wise from someone who has been there.
in our office we just back up the whole network... we are working on centralizing everything but it's a pretty painful process... we back up all of our data files using WinRar (and divide up for storage on CD-RW's)... I also grabbed a copy of PC Magazine's Tree program and I schedule it to run every night at 11:00 and it takes a snapshot of our directory structures (reminds me of what programs we had and how the network was configured)... then the backup runs at 11:30 and the next day we burn it to CDRW's... Every friday we burn to CD-R's and take them off site... that way if the place burns down we have info that is max 1 week old (barring strange things like corrupted files)... this also allows us to recover older files that may have gotten deleted/infected and not realized for a couple of days/weeks (as they are in the offsite CD-R's)... there are a few caveats with our method... 1) you gotta pay for WinRar ($30), not a lot but it's not free but I like the interface so I use it... 2) Media can get costly (contrary to advertising CD-RW's do not last for 1,000 rewrites - we get about a 6 months to a year our of them, and we gotta buy CD-R's on top of that... 3) size... we have 5 computers on our network and they take up 2 CD's at the moment and we are teetering on 3 at the moment so if you need more storage space this isn't a good option... 4) speed of restore (it takes a while unlike a ghost option cause you have to reinstall all the programs/settings/data files... so it can take a while... but it works for us... we even had all of our laptops stolen last week (3 of them)... I had them back to normal in less than a day... so like I said it depends on the size of your network... if it's big this is not the option for you... it's incredibly transparent to everyone cause you can schedule it to run at night, just make sure that people leave their laptops behind every so often otherwise they never get backed up...
Every time I've been in a unix shop, they've backed up the home directories on a regular schedule. Every time I've been in a winblows shop, NO BACKUPS!
Unbelievable that the windows world is still so fucked up. Even in Windows 2000, it's tough to use your own home directory in a free-format manner, since all of the applications default to putting stuff in directories named "My This" and "My That." All I want to do is organize my data the way I WANT TO, without having to use that stupid GUI thingy every time I want to put things into my home dir.
Everything I've heard here--especially about migrating data off of hard drives onto a redundant file server, and changing where applications look for/save data-- is good advice, in a normal setting.
Unfortunately, i have already been told that "moving people's data off their hard drives is bad." So much for the easy way out.
GAAAH.
My new strategy, since these are all Windows machines, is to put some of the responsibility in the hands of the user, but painlessly. I have written an MS-DOS script that will copy the full contents of everyone's "My Documents" to their area on the server, and then do the same for all database and email files. All they need to do is click a widget.
The best part of this is, if they don't do it after I've asked them to, it's not my ass. I have already made sure of that in writing (and I'm suuuuuure that won't come back to bite me in the butt).
After the user data is on the server, it should be no problem to cook it down to a tape drive periodically, filtering out crap like video clips and mp3's that are't work-related.
Anybody care to comment on this approach as a start?
Personally, I'd set up a central server that deals with all their stuff. Then you can back it up yourself, and not have to rely on them to do the right thing. Tell them that their hard drives will be wiped ever X days, even if you don't plan on actaully wiping them.
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Also there are companies that consult, or offer redundancies or whatever. If you're in the NY tri-state area I know that one such company is Fluid Reality I don't know how much info is on their site, but I've heard alot of stuff about their Data Guardian data services.
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Nothing can be done before the tremendous power!
RabidComics
You are not qualified for the job... There is not too much OS specific stuff here, don't use "it's all Windows" as an excuse.
Any decent tape drive comes with a backup software. NT server should include it too. Install the tape into one of the machines (not necessarily the server -- could be your machine) and tell it to back up all shares of all computers on the network. (C$ -- the "hidden" exports of the C: drive on each machine is, probably, the best).
Instead of retaining an outside company, train the receptionist to change the tape daily and take the previous full backup tape home. You may even put the tape drive into the receptionist's machine. In my experience, this people are the best for this -- meticulous and accurate, they also tend to appreciate the trust, the "computer guy" -- you -- put into them. Just be sure they know not to store the tapes near microwave ovens, etc.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
But oppressing your users with clever uses of poledit is the hallmark of the "power" Windows user! I mean administrator.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Configure roaming profiles on your server and make sure the users log off. This will backup all the 'working' copies they save on the desktop. If they don't log off, the roaming profile is not saved back to the server.
It's a small office of around 30 users...
I am the IT person for the office...and what I found out that works best is Veritas Backup Exec...
It works great...
"Look where we worship" -- Jim Morrison
1. Ideally you can go with
-a file server to provide home directories, combined with logon scripts to map drives
-backup software and tape drive(s) to backup the file server
-some sort of software to install on each client, eg. www.connected.com, used to backup client-based files (ideal for your road warriors and anyone who doesn't always have access to the file server. This software will automatically back up designated directories to a server, which then should also be backed up to tape. I've used this product before; backups and recoveries are a snap
-a good rotation/offsite storage scheme
2. at a minimum you can go with
-a file server for users to dump their files to on a regular basis
-a script of some sort that replicates certain portions of user hard drives to the server
-backup software and hardware
-tape rotation/offsite storage
Some open questions:
-do you have a domain controller to authenticate againse, and push logon scripts from, or are all your clients and servers not part of a domain?
-how much budget do you have available?
-how much data are we talking about?
-how many users are we talking about?
Depending on how many users/how much data, you may be able to get by with ntbackup, provided as part of NT4.0/Win2000 as your backup software. My company primarily uses NetBackup, but we use ntbackup for 1 or 2 isolated networks.
I have a similiar problem. thing is, I have a 20/40 GB DAT drive on my linux box that I have no idea how to use. Can anyone point me to some links regarding Linux (RH 7.) and backups. Much appreciated.
Dantz's Retrospect is a good choice. You put a client on each workstation and one machine acts as server. This software is the only backup utility I know of that allows true incremental backups. It matches the files it finds on clients to files it has already backed up, if it finds it in the backup, it does not copy it again. Saves a lot of space just by not backing up the Windows 2000 system folder on each machine.
Short and sweet - look into roaming profiles - this feature will COPY (not move) people's information into their profile directory on the server every time thel log off the workstation.
Lots of people fear roaming profiles (I used to, also) but since I've needed to support 300+ users as a one man staff, I can attest to them being a HUGE time saver.
Be sure to turn IE cache down to 1 MB, though.
Remember that the systems that you put in now have a tremendous effect on the organization of the company in the future. Likewise the policies you put in now, as long as they are reasonable, not to draconian, and CYA and CYCA (Cover your companies A$$) are important.
As time goes on, System Admining becomes a lot less about turning kernals, and a lot more about engineering data flow around the company. Realize that as a system admin, you now have a _lot_ of legal responsibility in the company. Among other things, you have to arbitrate between User privacy, and company security. In addition, you have root access to business documents that can and often must be considered confidential.
I recently asked a officer onboard a navy ship what was the most restricted position for people to be in. Turns out it is IT. They have access to just about anything, and so security must be tight.
Therefore, with System's Engineering perhaps more then any other computer job, you must not comprimise on principle and design if at all possible (which is not always true).
I highly recommend (If you have the money) Veritas' NetBackup Professional. It backs up user's workstations to a central disk, and they can even do file-level restores by themselves. We use it in our offices for laptops, workstations, whatever. The only problem is that the catalog gets really unhappy if you shut it down badly.
No only do I backup all my linux boxes with amanda, but I have added several windows clients with samba as the link. It works great. It is also common practice here for windows users to not backup their machines. Incredible ! No ?
Install Wake on lan network cards in all their computers and have the server back up their computers each night... or eliminate local storage and back up the server.
I actually do support for a bunch of users of Windows 95 (Yuck) and NT (not much better). We have had haard drives go and people lose data but it does not ever seem to happen often enough. Makes things even more difficuilt when you have to back up across a WAN but nonetheless the following are what I do: .pst files as personal folders do get huge and corrupt fairly easily although there is an inbox repair tool that will fix it supplied by Microsoft, but, if it is local and the fix does not work they are screwed and sad and ready to blame whoever they can, also in the same vein check to see if someone has setup a sedktop user with an .ost file that is not needed and can really slow down logons and logoffs.
-I always tell people that hard drives are not built as well as they should be.
-In idle conversation with users I let them know horror stories(conveniently made up on the way to work) of people losing years of data.
-I have users save to the "My Documents" folder which as has been mentioned by others is their home folder.
-When ever troubleshooting problems I check to see what is local and tell the user of great reasons to have data backed up to the network (daily backup and fast restores when things get accidently deleted)
-If using exchange and limits remember to look for
... first of all, map their individual home directory on the server as a permanent network connection, then set Office to defaulting to saving there.
Then, let them do whatever they want, and point out, when they lose data, and they will, that network policy is that it should have been saved on the server.
Our accounting people used to keep all their spreadsheets on floppies, despite a server with daily backups. Every single one of them learned to use the network the same way: Dead floppies.
Accountant: "I can't open this file."
Me: (after testing the disk): The floppy is worn out.
Accountant: "Can you save it?"
Me: "No, you'll have to recreate the last eight months of data entry. If you'd put it on the server, like I told you to, I could pull yesterday's copy in five minutes."
Haven't had that conversation twice with the same person yet.
I've worked in IT for both large 'enterprise' companies as well as smaller 20 - 30 user environments. My suggestion to you is an application called DataArmour. It is an inexpensive solution, and works very well within a small Windows environment since it allows backups to virtually any sort of medium including a mapped network drive (Ex: A tape backup system is not necessary). Hope this helps.
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Re-direct (change the target) on the My Documents folder to a central network drive that is backup up nightly, and instruct all users that any data that is not stored in the My Documents folder will be deleted on a nightly basis.
This does two things, it insures that the data will be backed up, and it simplifies administration. Having to install and administer remote backup software can be a major pain.
Why not try making the staff's compliance public? Test the staff's own backups to the server periodically / randomly. Then fire off a memo to the boss stating the results of the test; who complied, who failed to backup as of the night before. Post a copy of the memo on the frig. The staff knows they've been ID'd, and in the event of a true failure; the results can be trotted out who does and does not try....
The most simple solution is to get a backup application package. The larger ones, Veritas, Legato, and Tivoli all work well and have client software that supports almost any platform under the sun, including all Microsoft platforms.
If you are using an SSP (storage service provider) you should be able to still use features like the vaulting option from Veritas and I believe Alpha Stor from Legato. These packages allow you to migrate data over a network to another location while keeping a copy local.
Another feature you should be looking at is possible expantion. Veritas, Legato, and Tivoli all have functions that allow you expand your backup environment as you need to.
As far as the different packages stand, Veritas is usually more expensive than the others, a little slower, but very easy to install, configure, and change as time goes on.
Legato is a little harder to setup and configure, but it is a little cheaper and it does push tape drives faster.
I haven't worked with Tivoli much so I can't offer any input with that product.
After you get one of these pakages installed, you can just set up the policies on the master backup server to run let's say at noon if people turn off thier machines at night (a full backup of an 8 gig hard drive with a SCSI DLT drive takes about 20-30 minutes, I believe). And as far as the rest of the people that like to leave thier machines on at night, you can back up thier drives in the evening.
Additional clarification: Buy a good tape drive. Do not let cost be your guide; buy the best-rated drive you can find. Again, if they give you grief about the drive's cost, the parent poster's advice still applies.
I used to work at $(MUMBLE_SALTPILE_MUMBLE), whose IT department was staffed by people of diminished capacity. One day, due to a re-org, they physically moved a server containing critical data. Somehow, the move killed the drives. So they went to restore from backups.
During the restore, the drive ate itself and the tape. Backup destroyed.
Now, because the IT department had the aforementioned staff of diminished capacity, the next available backup was a week old (it turns out they were doing daily backups serially onto the same tape, because it was "faster").
So the lessons here are:
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Write a login script to map a drive back to the server, and copy *.doc, *.xls etc. off the C: drive to the server's drive (or alternatley, copy the whole my documents folder, IF they actually use that folder). Use Xcopy /A so only changed files get copied up. Sure it'll take a while the first time they log on, but if you roll out the script by small groups of people every day, you shouldn't take too much of a network hit.
The (Hopefully) Great Slashdot Blackout Apr 21-27
As stated earlier by someone else, Use Retrospect.
I mean it.
Setup a dedicated box to run Retrospect Server, then install Retrospect Client on all of the workstations. Retrospect will happily backup all your precious data for you, automatically, every day. They won't even have to know it's happening.
You can backup to damn near any media or device you want. Retrospect gives you the best control over your backups.
www.dantz.com
Gabriel Ricard
Well, this is a major problem in the industry, mostly because of the cost. Note that I am an engineer that sells TSM for IBM so I will avoid any product discussions as I am obviously not objective.
So the problem is currently user data. For now it seems everybody is focusing on one of two solutions:
Make certain the users put their business critical data on a file server and then backup the file server. The good of this solution is its less expensive and you can normally afford a backup network (LAN or SAN) on servers. The bad is that we all know users will not follow this mandate completely.
The second solution is to do workstation and/or laptop backups (let's table other mobile devices such as PDA's for now, most organizations aren't even allowing themselves to think about the data/software on those). Workstation backups can be done, but it requires advanced software AND sufficient network (although certain software features can reduce this) AND support personnel.
The good of the second solution is that if it is well designed there is much less exposure to data loss. The bad is the cost to do it well.
Now, unless I missed some posts, nobody has dicussed less "backup centric" solutions such as a script to sync up a desktop to a file server automatically or other solutions like MS' DFS. Somebody posted a question recently that I think has some value. Taking the distributed computing concepts to another level, it would be great to make a distributed data protection solution that could have desktops have duplicates of their data on nearby workstations (just data-data not system or app files). That data could be synchronized several times daily. This data would also get replicated to the file servers less often and then those servers would get backed up. This would give you 3 levels of protection. If you could do the replication to other desktops and the file server as a low-performance background process, the impact to the user and network would be reduced.
So, now what are you going to do about all that data that is not on a file-system but rather in a DB or DB-esque data store. Can anybody say MS Exchange?
Sleep tight.
I back up a dozen servers and workstations regularly.... it's really not a problem. That's what stuff like Veritas Netbackup was *designed* to do.
You need a small business server. You can justify this to the superiors quite easily. Check out DataHive, they make servers specifically for small business, based upon OpenBSD. It was actually recently reviewed under the BSD section.
Its REALLY easy to setup, requires next to no maintenence, and if users save files to it, and it has automatic RAID 1 to protect data. And with OpenBSD on the backend, how can you go wrong?
Our department consisted of software engineers with development workstations. They needed total control of their own C: drives. The department provided 1) easy to use, backed-up private shares on file servers, 2)team r/w share points, and 3)department-wide r/w non-backed-up "temp" shares where files were only guaranteed to last 72 hours. So, three classes of shares, 3 scopes of access, 2 classes of them backed up. Your C drive was your own responsibility. Management was trained and bought into the idea that workers needed to be personally responsible for putting important stuff on the department shares. Slackers got no sympathy from anybody, because the share points made it soooo easy to be a good boy or girl. The "private" share addressed peoples need (real or imagined) for a place for "their private stuff" -- this is important to getting everybody's buy in.
they let me centralize our files. An office full of CAD drawings and 3D models can get screwed up pretty quick when a drive goes down.
We put in a 240 GB NAS box, stuck all of our data on it (it only filled 20 gig), and I run automated backup on it every day. Had to invest about four grand in it, but it was worth it. Case in point - our accountant (boss's wife)'s drive died yesterday. Gee, whats all our billing information worth? Think maybe we paid for that system in one day?
anything i tell you will cloud your opinion.
Assuming all the PC's are networked, map a common drive letter for everyone's 'personal', say P:, and drive letter for a shared directory, say S:. Then make everyone save everything to the server.
If you need to limit the size of the local drive partition to just barely enough to hold what it must, i.e. Windows and applications. This will force them to use the file server as they will have no room on their local drive. You can use something like Partion Magic or Ranish Partition Manager to do this.
Make sure the server has plenty of drive space that is on a mirrored drive array. Back up the server every day.
Having everything important in one place makes the backup process a lot easier then trying to get every user to do it.
If you have laptop users that must have files on their local drive you will have to teach them to copy stuff to the file server and back. Possibly using the Windows breifcase feature.
I work in a county office where the people were not required to even be lusers before they were hired. I found that the easiest way(although time consuming)to ensure they back up the data is to point all of their apps to default to a file share. Half the people here don't even know how to change folders in the save dialog, hence problem solved.
Also, I did not have to engineer a disaster to get the back up point across. Our finance managers hard drive crapped, wiping out the last years financial records with the auditor coming in a week. I managed to chop through her drive using an old dos booter that I found in a box. I saved her ass, she bought me lunch...and she backs everything up daily. Hooray for windows!
My experience is that the less your users have to do with backups, the better - they click through error messages, they don't read EULAs, they will not take the care you will because it is not a concern they have internalized. In general, it needs to be as automatic, hands-free and brainless as possible. REMEMBER, SIMPLE == GOOD, COMPLEX == BAD! However, you also need to realize that the backups procedures are just one part of the larger picture. Simply backing up isn't good enough, you need to create a situation where they don't have to make decisions about backing up. From their perspective, they have to just remember to keep their files in X location and the backups will just happen.
Here's (roughly) what I did:
Create a folder to hold all user files on the server, say "Files". Make sure this folder gets backed up. :)
Share the folder, and create a logon script that every user runs at logon to map this share to a COMMONLY AVAILABLE drive letter, say W:.
On W: Create several top-level folders: Private (create a folder in here for each user accessible only to them) Shared (create folders here that need to be shared by groups) Apps (create folders in here to hold for application files and data used by programs) Software (for program install files) etc...
Make sure security is set up to PREVENT users from saving files where they do not belong (like the root of W:). You may want to create a user group for each folder and use membership in that group to control access to the files. They should have to come to you to create a new folder for them in most cases, that gives you the opportunity to review the request with your superiors to ensure proper Policy & Procedures are being followed.
Teach your users this mantra "PUT ALL FILES ON W:" Put it in your email sig, your memos and on your voicemail! Use it in casual conversation - I'm not kidding, REPETITION!)
Go to each PC and move their files into their W:\Private\username folder.
Delete the moved files from their hard drive.
Reset all apps (word, excel, etc.) to default open/save on the W: drive.
Your goal should be to reprogram them to think of the network drive as the only place there is to save files.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
Where I work, all Linux users NFS mount their /home directories (via automount and NIS) from a central server. They can log into any of our workstations, and have all of their desktop preferences and files.
:-)
All of the Windows machines are on a domain that's handled by the same central server running Samba. They can log into any Windows machine, and all of their preferences and files are there waiting for them.
Backups are done nightly to a DLT 8000 drive that hangs off of the central server. This has saved people's asses many times when a machine blows up (sometimes literally).
With 120gig drives as cheap as they are, and entry level robotic tape changers on the market for less than $10,000, there's no reason anyone should have to suffer through a loss of critical amounts of data.
I sleep very well at night with this arrangement.
How data gets backed up ... is sometimes dictated by who is responsible for it. Who's ass is on the line?
...)
If the individual users are responsible for their PC's data, then they probably back it up (or think they do, or try to, or intend to, or forget to, or
If the system's guys are responsible, then they probably back it up, remotely, automatically. Your post doesn't say who is responsible. Be nice if there was a policy, huh?
Responsibility without autority sucks. Beware.
=brian
It could work, but I've seen some pretty stupid users. I fixed an NT4 file server at my highschool not too long ago. The home directories were set wrong, and students work would dissapear. EVERY DAY we told them to back their stuff up while I went through and reconfigured the server and the clients to use real roaming profiles.
Not a single student even copied their work to a floppy. And we were providing them with blank disks! Every day someone would come up and say "I lost my work" and we would just laugh at them, because they didn't backup when we told them to. The really sad thing is that even the kids who lost stuff wouldnt back up!
My advice to you is to get all their work on the server and make backups from that. Users will not even be moved by a demonstration.
~Ryan
Make sure a policy is made. If you have no policy, you'll have no direction. You'll have no "previously agreed to in writing thing" by which you demonstrate that this is something the company both wants and needs. Everyone will argue with you about why any of this annoying mess is needed - after all, it gets in the way of their work.
You'll end up with a hodge podge of solutions, that may or may not address the problems you're trying to fix, and no written explainations to point to when someone asks why. You also may be blamed for any and every problem experienced, and will have nothing to point to and say "we ignored that because..." (remember, policy should state what (known) problems you are ignoring as well as those you deal with).
. . .the obligatory "Ditch NT4 Server for *BSD" [which I know in reality won't happen], do something like this:
- create individual folders on the server for all personnel who have logins.
- tweak all induhvidual's programs so that they save everything on the server by default, and that they open the folder on the server by default.
- Back up the server.
Keeping everything server-centric has many advantages, most of which you already know. the others you will learn.
Don't let users store all their own crap on their own machines. Work exclusively from a shared storage area on a networked machine, with everything set up so that a simple login on the client desktop provides access. For a small shop this will be a two-day job, and there are many many ways to do it. You could do it with a linux box running samba as domain controller and CIFS file server, and run it all from there. Very easy.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Maybe someone at score:1 has already posted this (i browse at +2), but setup a win2k server (samba might be able to do this as well) and setup the user accounts to map the user directories and profile to the server, and NOT the workstations. Then install the backup device of your choice to the server and backup the data as needed / desired. To prevent the users from screwing with their profiles, make the profiles mandatory by renaming the ntuser.dat to ntuser.man in the user profile (which if i recall, is in the active directory users and computer tool on win2k server).
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
IBM's TSM/ADSM is very nice. Rather unobtrusive, and last I looked no per-seat licensing, just more expensive server licenses. Also, since TSM/ADSM back up snapshots/revisions the added functionality of letting users retrieve old documents will make them want to opt-in to the backup. For your scenario, it may still be too expensive. Too bad, really.
I'm not going to suggest ruling through fear, because it just doesn't work. What you need to do (and what we did here a long while ago) is to make it so people want to use the network drives. We set up a system where everything was organized and people could the have an easier time finding what they wanted. We set up multiple network drives, each with a specific purpose. One was for company documents (SOPs, forms, etc). One was for correspondence with other companies, and was organized by company. Things of that nature. It didn't happen overnight, but eventually people realized that this was easier than keeping everything locally and having to try and figure out who had this document or keeping multiple copies of things on different computers. It certainly won't happen overnight, and you will have to remind people constantly at first, but eventually they will realize the benefits of it (especially the first time they accidentally overwrite a file and you can recover it from the backup). The key is that it will take a long time to make everyone use it consistently, and there is no way to change that.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
We rotate our backup tapes so that every thursday tape goes to a safety deposit box at the bank. We have five thursday tapes so that we always have a backup from a month ago (more or less...)
I know that many here have asked why we don't just use the fire safe, but that really won't protect a plastic backup tape because while it won't burn it will get hot.
Everything that is important to our business is stored on the server and gets backed up nightly. This is something that has saved our ass's many a times. One occurance was when a rather new employee decided that Kazaa would be cool to install. The virus we contracted destroyed over 6,000 jpegs and it took me over 10 hours to clean up the mess.
How many businesses would survive a total loss of all business data? I am betting less than half.
I know what the Internet is, what the hell is this Interweb business?!
Give Novell's iFolder a shot. It does not require Netware at all. You put a small client on your desktop and that talks directly with the server. It synchs your files both ways. The great thing about it is that if you lose your laptop just install iFolder on another laptop or desktop, login and your files get pulled down. It also runs in the background and does bit by bit changes to limit the amount of bandwidth used...
...try maybe writing a script that runs locally on each machine, checking the timestamp on every file, and uploads all files created or modified that day to a separate directory for each machine (and maybe a subdirectory for each day\week\interval) on the server. Set the script to run as often as you believe appropriate (I'd go for a minimum of once every 3 days; daily would be better) at ~2am.
If you want to be a little more efficient about it, lock down the majority of the local disks and only have the script check the directories they have write permissions to.
If you're on NT/2000 use the 'Robocopy' utility which creates exact, mirror-image backups so you don't have the chore of cleaning-out old files on the backup server. My copy came with the Win2000 Pro Resource Kit but I think you can download it from the M$ site. It allows you to write simple batch files using drive mapping which can then be scheduled to run using the Task Scheduler. All you need then is a central repository on the server for copies of user directories. It's an old NT4 utility so you shouldn't have trouble finding a copy.
Cool. I would be interested in looking at that. Are you going to publish it here?
Personally, we didn't even try at a number of places I've worked (years ago, before My Documents could be replicated to servers automatically and so on) - we just couldn't get everyone into the habit; since we were a Mac shop, we used Retrospect to monitor and backup everyones' workstation and make sure we hoovered out everything that couldn't be restored trivially. They do Windows now, and it's all user transparent.
Using rsync, I synchronize the main fileserver over to the backup computer on a regular basis. You can 'snapshot' days and weeks of data without using lots of hard-drive space by using the fine tutorial written by Mike Rubel.
I set-up the workstation's "My Documents" default to point to a shared drive (S:) on our fileserver. This automatically points everyone to the right place without even looking at their system. I also harp on how important it is to save files to the shared drive.
For laptop users, I setup a cygwin-minimal-rsync system. All backups are encrypted through ssh. Furthermore, the backup server is restricted to only running rsync backups.
Everytime they start their laptops, a batch file in the startup group opens. They can choose to abort (if they are not connected to the lan) or continue with a backup.
Because it uses rsync, only their changes are saved to the backup computer. This usually only takes a minute or two. Most users have other things to do while it is backing up.
The system cost $600. I have had two complete laptop failures since then with full recovery. Not only that, I can recover files accidently written over almost two months later. The investment was worth every single penny!
I did some consulting at a HUGE children's book publisher in lower Manhattan a couple years back. There were thousands of employees spanning 3 or 4 buildings. Servers galore, but hardly anyone used them, save for their Exchange mail. When someone's machine would die, at times years of work would be lost. I couldn't believe it. I came from a background of small business consulting and made sure every user understood that data that was not saved on the network would be irrecoverable if disaster struck, further no attempt would be made to recover C: drive data. I found that spending less than 5 minutes per employeee was usually all it took to convince them to use the server. All it takes is for someone to speak in plain english about the risks. The big corporation had no formal computer policy or introduction for new hires. It was a mess. iFolder, as mentioned previously, is the roxor. It is extremely simple to set up and lets your road warriors, home users stay in sync, no VPN required. I LOVE NOVELL NETWARE!!!
Installing OpenAFS on one or more Linux servers will solve the problem. Client software is available, at least for WinNT/20000/XP.
It may be a litte hard to install the first time (perhaps pay someone to do it) but the security, backup and replication features will take all your pain away. Forever.
If you have just a few workstations, you can do what
I do: make all users' drives mountable via smb and
use Samba to retrieve the data from one central
location for backup. This of course has security
implications, which are a separate topic.
But anyway, this gives out when there are too
many workstations for you to mount them all
look through them finding relevant directories
to back up in a reasonable amount of time. In
that case, I suggest migrating toward thin
clients. One workstation at a time, in a
systematic order, you do the following:
1. Install thin client in user's office.
This is a hard-drive-free system that
boots from the network. Once you get
the users all using these, your backup
issues are all centralised for sure
(barring floppies and other removables).
2. Give user two days to move everything
from the old computer to "the new one"
(i.e., the network). You will want to
have premade a document on how to do
this, and some users will still need
help with the migration, which will
limit the number of these you can do
at once. Be prepared to support the
users and help them, because many of
them will have very strange ideas about
where their files are stored. Expect
to be told that important files are "in"
the application used to create them (b/c
of MRU lists), and end up finding them
who only knows where, including system
directories where data should never have
been stored.
3. Once each user is migrated to the thin
client and network solution, you can take
the old system, pull the HD, and use it
for a new thin client for the next round
of migrations.
4. Make sure the cure isn't worse than the
disease. This means at least three
things:
A. The server does not have down time.
Because if it goes down for even
a few minutes, you waste LOTS of
time, cumulative for the number of
people who can't do their jobs until
it is fixed.
B. The server is backed up en toto
with substantial frequency, and the
backups stored offsite.
C. Storing things on the server does
NOT mean everyone gets the same
bog-standard environment. In
particular, it is critical for
users to be able to customise
what they could customise before.
You can get all Windows users to
use the same version of Windows,
probably (but beware of license
issues), but don't expect them to
all use the same applications or
have the same wallpaper et cetera.
They'll hate you if you do that.
If you happen to have any users of
OSes other than Windows, don't try
to make them use Windows. Unix
people will be able to cooperate
with automating backups (you can
put cron jobs on their workstations,
and all is well; Unix people will
understand about certain magic
directory trees getting backed up
automatically, too). MacOS is a
harder problem; if you can get them
to upgrade to OS X, you can use a
cron job to back things up to the
fileserver from ~user. Classic
MacOS I don't know what to do about
however.
Contrary to other posts, don't set cron jobs
for midnight. Modern systems can handle the
load, and the added likelihood that the system
will be turned on makes it worth doing such
things in the daytime.
Quick idea: Scripts that dump certain folders (My Docs, etc) to a specific place. Depending on users, might be a good idea to do it weekly (if weekend/Sunday is free.
PCTrauma LLC
Secretly replace one workers harddisk with a new one (empty), and watch the panic. Step in and say what you did, and tell everyone that tomorrow this could be reality for any of them. How about we make back ups?
;)
Maybe it is not strikly neccesary to replace a disk, but the idea still stands
I was a sysadmin at an education establishment for a couple of years, several years back. My employment marked the beginning of some major investment. So we setup each user's machine to a standard model. With the default set to storing files on the server. This was simple with DOS/Win3.11 on the old machines but Win95 on the new machines was a complete arse. Did it in the end. But each PC took more than a day to setup until we discovered Ghost (and thanx to that wonderful MS software this wasn't as useful as you'd expect).
:)
:)
So we had to shuffle PC around quite a bit before we managed to level the playing field. We also had a policy replacing "faulty" computers with spares. Taking their PC away for "repair" for a couple of weeks, with a stern warning that we'd do everything we could to keep to avoid reinstalling the OS; but we couldn't guarentee it. Invariably we'd fix it in a day without a reinstall. But we'd developed this illusion that we were always snowed-under (mostly true) so keeping them for a couple of weeks was possible. If they pleaded we'd copy the data onto the servers then rush the PC back within a day or two.
People would change stuff and some people did loose files. But thankfully not too much. The position was that the PC was the College's, not theirs. We had provided it in a state that would ensure data integrity and it was their actions that had caused the loss of data; so blaming the tools was not an available excuse.
Of course the IT Dept (all 2 of us) lost data with regularity as we'd hammer our machines, and never heed our own advice
The whole thing was a complete nightmare. But in the end we managed it; and once the mind-set had taken hold even new-employees picked it up without and help from us IT guys.
But of all the computers in the whole place (150 staff PC & 30 student PCs) there were about 25 that we couldn't touch. Five were in a department that thrashed their computers; but they were perfectly capable of taking care of their own; the remainder belonged to people who had sufficient weight to demand we accept responsibility for their mistakes.
After three major disasters in one week - two were wear & tear; one had been taken home and the kid's had "done something" - we got an absolute pasting for not taking care of their precious data. Out of the blue my Boss and I were summoned to a meeting and instructed to make sure in never happened agiain.
So we explained the current backup procedures - OS backed-up with ghost onto a hidden partition - would fix 80% of problems, and the OS could always be re-installed if the HDD died; all PCs set to save to the network; the nightly backup with a detailed outline of the rotation strategy.
Then we explined why we did it this way - only 2 DDS4s; no fancy software.
We went on to explain the alternative, with a detailed (mildly inflated) cost breakdown. Pointing out that this figure was more than the entire IT department budget for the last 18 months and was, therefore, impossible. Although we were referring to backing up ALL the PCs; whereas they thought we meant just their PCs.
We were dismissed with a vauge promise to investigate funding. The funding was often prommised and never forthcoming. But we never heard any more about how their data was our responsibility either.
I'll say this for working in education, we managed to build a something which to the users looked like a top class network - with a stupidly small amount of money. And I'm proud of what I acheived. But going to work every day was like going to war. And in the end it destroyed a couple of close friendships when I finally had enough and walked out.
And the moral of this rant? Cover your arse, but remember - in the end - it's just a job.
Do you mind, your karma has just run over my dogma.
I'm the MIS Manager at a small software development company. I admin about 25 Windows 2000 desktops, among other things. I discovered that Windows has a rather simple backup tool built in. I believe it is included in 98 as well as 2000.
Start / Programs / Accessories / System Tools / Backup
I tell everyone to save all important work in their My Documents folder. Most people do this already. Then at 4pm every day, that folder is backed up to our network file server. Most people don't even realize it's happening. The file server hosts a 120G RAID 5, and I'm working on getting a tape system set up to back that up. Triple-redundant baby.
-- Have you ever noticed that at trade shows, Microsoft is always the company that is handing out stress balls?
If there's not that many desktops, it's often easier to just redirect My Documents by right clicking it and setting a new path (I use H:\ for "Home"...though U for "you" is quite cute [g]). Poledit on Win9x machines is downright ugly.
Here's a nice trick: you can use a single Linux (or other unix) machine running samba, rsync, and cron to keep all of the windows boxes' hard disks backed up, incrementally, without spending a dime on software. See http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots for details.
Since you're a small site, you prolly won't get into too much trouble _not_ following corporate policy to a "t." However, when you find policy that fits your needs, cite it and tell the folks its in their best interest to have such-and-such implemented. Type up an official Memo/email and with all of your (new) policies and how they'll affect your users. Make sure to CC: it to your boss (remember to CYA!)
Of course, if there is no corporate/upper level computing policies, you need to find another job! Seriously though, I've seen a lot of good suggestions here. Make sure you've been given all the resources, policy and authority you need to make things work. You _WILL_ have a lot of pissed off people for the few weeks you'll spend implementing things and ironing out problems. However in the end, your users will be in a better situation and you'll have a nice little paragraph to put on your resume ;-)
Good luck!
-Bob
Someone must be in charge of IT at the main office. Someone must have been in a position of power to tell you that "this doesn't happen again." Get that person on your side and tell him/her that without their support and approval, it WILL happen again.
As it has been said already by many others, you NEED management support or you are destined to fail due to lack of support or get fired for being a maverick.
Sometimes the best way to make users conform to policy is to not give them a choice in the first place.
If your user base is as apathetic as you described, Cliff's advice is a must. No choices. Get management to use its iron fist so as not to make you the lone bad guy.
--
dman123 forever!
Filtering out the -1s and 0s since 1999.
I found a little utility called Backup Magic that works pretty well. You configure the important directories that you want backed up, specify the network-shared folder to copy them too and set it to automatically start when clicked. Then you can just add it to a system schedular and it's done automatically.
Upon re-reading your question, I see that you have already had your Disaster That Everyone Should Learn From, so there should be no need to engineer one.
The first thing to do (which you may have already done) is create a folder called "Home" or "Users" or something similar. In that folder make subfolders for each user or position (job titles are good for positions with lots of turnover, like receptionists, while department heads tend to like seeing their names on things) and set the access in the Sharing and the Security tabs. You can be 'loose' in the Sharing tab, but you MUST be 'tight' in the Security tab. (Security affects all access whether local or over the network.) Figuring out which boss gets which access to which employees files will probably be the most annoying part. That's it from the server side. For starters, anyway.
On the client side, you'll have to go around and map the appropriate drives from each workstation. Use the same drive letter for everybody, it makes it easier to help them when they lose stuff. If users will have to be connected to multiple drives, you might want to make sure that 'Policies' is always P:, while 'Accounting' is always M:, or what have you. Set them to reconnect at logon. Move all the user documents to the networked folder. If you just copy them, the users will somehow manage to create problems by saving the networked version locally and vice-versa. You'll probably have to use the Find program to get all their documents, since the users probably don't know where they all are, and non-MS apps store them in different folders. If they have desktop shortcuts to local folders, you should delete them, and recreate ones that point to the new locations. Then, you'll have to go into each app and change the default save location from C:\My Documents, to H:\whatever.
You should also write a 'How To Work With Network Files' cheat sheet and distribute it to everyone. They probably won't read it, but you'll feel better.
You can use logon scripts to do the drive mapping, but it doesn't always work with Win9x quite right, so it might be easier to skip that. If the server is locked up when the users logon, they won't access their drives (obviously), and they'll get an error message. Unfortunately, the most common response to this message is to tell the pc to NOT reconnect to the share at the next logon, so the drives will be 'gone' as far the users are concerned. They will then panic. It's not a big deal, but it is something to be aware of.
Also, have a backup plan for tape-swapping when you're on vacation or out sick. You are the de facto administrator, so you should have a de facto assistant.
It will be a fair amount of work on the setup side, but it shouldn't be too much upkeep, barring lots of employee turnover. IF you have things organized well the first time that is. It's worth it to spend more time upfront.
As far as the actual backups go, test it by backing up a few random folders every week or two. You don't want to have the first time you back something up be the first time something goes wrong. Trust me on that, it sucks.
"Bugger this, I want a better world." - Jenny Sparks
I had a similar situation, if possible remap all of their folders to a location on a server. Have all of them work on shortcuts NOT originals. With all of them working off of files on a file server you can backup the server with our worrying about them. Some users will create new docs, just have them keep all of their files within a folder you create, and again only give them a shortcut to it on their desktop.
Constantly ghosting drives when people screw up there machines is only going to be a make work project. If you've got a network drive for them to use, and you don't want them to be mucking with the machine anyways, why let them?
Deep Freeze will stop them for you. Lets the users do whatever they want to the HD, but once the machine is rebooted, back to a clean state. So anything saved that was on the local disk ain't there anymore, except what should be. As a benifit, this will render you virus free too, as it can't do anything.
This one got installed at my school last year. It certainly was a nasty shock for the people that were used to saving gobs of stuff on the hard drives and coming back to the same machines. Some most entertaining cries of dispair as they sat down at the machine they were using yesterday and went looking for their files. But they did quickly switch to using the network to save everything...
Make sure everyone knows that the data has been lost and that it was preventable. Once our salesstaff realized that one guy had lost all his contact info and presentations they were much more interested in backing up their own.
my hobbies include space walks, ether chugging contests and marathon sleep contests.
and make them use it for all company documents, then back up the network drive regularly to tape.
network drive does not have to be a huge 100 TB datahouse, it could be as simple as a shared drive on a dedicated win 2000 box. 2 100GB HDDS... one backs up to the other daily, and once a week you copy the second to tape and store it.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
I know - its expensive, proprietary etc - but you can install the backup client on just about any computer you can think of (they even make clients for netapp filers). I've sucessfully installed it on Windows 98, NT, 2000, XP, Tru64, Solaris, Linux (debian and redhat) and BSD.
What happens is the Tivoli server (it has a raid array, and a robot based tape drive) backs up the clients automatically and if you need a file you can restore it automatically without even going to the users desk. And its actually relatively quick.
Currently win2k can mount (win2k call them junction points, but whatever) disks onto an ntfs5 filesystem directory. It can even do what equates to hardlinking, BUT it only works on the local machine. You cannot link or mount windows shares, or lettered shares.
Maybe they will add the feature later to make "My Documents" link to \\remote-file-server\$username\dox ?
Hello everyone,
In our office we use Legato Networker . When a backup kicks off it runs in a minimized window. If you want more details you can expand the window and see what the software is doing. On my system the inital backup took about an hour for 2 gigs worth of data and that was compressed to about 431 megs according to the detailed logs. Subsequent backups take about 5 min or so, but that does depend on how much has changed and when the last time I did a backup. To restore files I go to the restore pane and it shows me, in an explorer style window, my files. I find what I want to restore and then drag and drop them. The software is very simple to use for end users and backup times are configureable. Out of other backup methods I have seen this is the best.
M. Prindle
-------
Windows, Just another pane in the Glass.
From the situation you describe, your small office is on the road to disaster. Until you can get someone to buy into the fact the computers and network are CRITICAL to the function of the business, you're not going to get anywhere and gain nothing but PAIN.
Backup is just one part of a keeping IT functions online and working. What about user installed software? Virus scanning? Configuration management? Hardware replacement? Just to name a few items. Without support from the heads of the office, forget it.
This all assumes, of course, that the IT functions are in fact critical to the business!!
Anything is possible given time and money.
There's a commercial product called Retrospect that does remote backups from a single server. We use this in our small office. Works fine, you have to do a small install on everyone's machine and somebody has to mount tapes every day.
I solved the problem by simply creating a folder on her desktop, changing its icon to the gray rectangular "hard drive" icon, and changing her hard drive's icon to a folder icon and renaming it "operating system stuff". I then copied her docs into the "hard drive" folder. From then on she faithfully saved all of her documents to the hard drive folder.
It worked well, although I sort of feel sorry for the next sysadmin who has to troubleshoot her machine.
Amazing magic tricks
People are idiots. Yesterday morning, I had a guy complaining that his computer stopped responding so he logged out and now nothing was working. I went to his office and pressed the power button which turned his machine back on.
I'll say it again. PEOPLE ARE STUPID.
IT != HR. If you want to find out if crab shampoo is covered by the health plan, ask HR. If you just deleted all of your data, crawl on your knees to IT and beg for mercy.
Get something like Legato Networker, or Arkeia.
No amount of coercion of users will guarantee their making backups.
This is a tautology.
Actually, after I posted I read your reply and I agree, that does look like a really good service for what they need. I'll recommend it. Thanks for the link!
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
1- Install diskless workstations
2- Backup everything and keep off site for a while
3- Keep bugging your users to delete unused data
4- Fire whoever is responsible for data loss
Retrospect for windows is a great backup app, as simple or as complex as needed. I use this at work to do exactly what is mentioned in this article.
and on every pc make that directory point to a shared folder on a server like
\\servername\sharename\%username
and then make on the server into the sharenamed folder a folder with full control only for that user.
%username is an environment variable in microsoft windows (it's %username on all different language versions of windows). You can manage the 'my documents' folder from the domain controller if you have win2k and active directory to point automatically to that dir, but on the win98 machines you have to do it yourself.
then tell users to use their 'my document' folder (easy - many microsoft programs already do it themselves by default).
Then do another shared for everybody, and with a logon script make every user mount it as, say, unit 'X:'. Tell them that everyone's documents are on unit X: and they'll be happy.
have fun.
-- There are two kind of sysadmins: Paranoids and Losers. (adapted from D. Bach)
Here are a couple of ideas, off of the top of my head.
1) Since you have a file server, create a batch job that runs in the wee hours of the morning. Its job is to copy data from the end user machines from their data directories (My Documents, etc), placing it in the appropriate sub directories on the server. This doesn't work if your users shut their machines off when they go home, and is the least likely candidate for implementation.
2) Use the "move" functionality of the "My Documents" folder to move their documents folders onto the file server itself. Be careful of permissions here.
3) Create shared folders on the file server for specific types of data. Accounting department documents go in g:\Accounting, Account Executive documents go in g:\AccountExecs, for instance. Get your users used to using those locations for their document storage.
Combine #2 and #3 and you have a pretty good storage system. If your office has a slow network (due to misconfiguration, old 10baseT network cards or lots of users), go for #1 and be thorough.
Last but not least, actually perform the backups! It is useless to implement any of these scenarios if you don't actually do the backups.
Good luck!
"To make a mistake is only human; to persist in a mistake is idiotic." Cicero
There is no excuse for not doing automatic backups. There is software out there (Backup exec by Veritas, etc, etc) that will do backups of Windows machines. We use DLT autoloaders as they are the most reliable and cost effective.
Backups are automated, users can restore their own files (if you choose to let them) and it will do bare metal disaster recovery.
More info www.veritas.com
[I have no connection with Veritas other than as a happy customer]
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck load of tapes
What we do here is have a Ghost image of our SOE. We tell all our users that we will use this image RANDOMLY, and if your data's local, IT'S GONE. Great for enforcing standardised desktops and the ultimate fix for any Windows problems. Every issue is fixed in ten minutes...
I used to work at a rather large software development company as an IT guy. My primary responsibility was backups and restores (backups/restores of internal data as well as restores of clents' corrupt databases for examination). When the company started out, obviously, it was rather small, having only a dozen or so employees. The backup system put into place then was geared toward a small office. Each machine was backed up so all data was safe.
:)
The problem with this is that the executives got used to the idea of vastly decentralized backup so that even when the number of machines in the organization had grown to over a thousand, they were dead set on retaining the decentralized backup schema. All local hard drives were still backed up on a weekly basis. Needless to say, this was a logistical nightmare. Users had to rember waht day their backup was and to leave their machine(s) on that day when they left from work. Often this did not happen and I had to track down the user and reschedule their backup.
To further complicate the matter, we had several servers performing the job of backing up all these machines to single DLT drives. Another downside - DLT tapes are HUGE. Storing old tapes for archival purposes in the fireproof safe was becomming less possible and the amount of room the tapes for the current cycle took up was approaching unmanageable.
I approached management with a proposal to centralize the backup system, but the best they would concede was leaving all machines on all the time so that the problem of "backup day" was eliminated.
Get a server and throw Linux on it. configure Samba and put a LOT of hard drive space in it. Map a drive on all of your users' machines to a location on the server that will server as a repository for important data. Drive into their heads that anything NOT saved to that "drive" will NOT be backed up. Put it into company policy to protect yourself when Joe User forgets to put the financials for the company on the server and they get deleted. Back up the SERVER! Forget about the workstations. Develop a drive image of a standard mcahine's hard drive and keep it up to date. That way when Windows crashes, you can just reimage the drive in the machine and the user is off and running again pretty quickly.
As a backup schedule, I reccommend doing a full backup every weekday if possible, and a differential Mon-Thur if not. Full backups on Fridays no matter what. Store EVERY Friday's tape safely in a fireproof safe until the end of the month and then move the end of the month backup tape off site to a secure location. Then, you buy one brand new tape per month and cycle the previous month's Friday tapes back in. Repeat.
Whatever you do, DON'T GET YOUR USERS USED TO HAVING THEIR LOCAL HDs BACKED UP. It can only turn out badly.
-Sam
Put together an easy to use backup (with instructions) and ask the users to run it every few days (or daily). Explain how it helps them - how long they can still get something that they delete off their hard drive as well as if their pc fails how easy it would be to restore stuff to a new, improved replacement pc. I've found that if it is easy, Users will do the right thing.
You know that this isn't a technical issue at all. It's an administrative/cultural/political issue. Depending on the company's business, it could be a legal issue as well. And -- call me a heretic -- but this isn't necessarily an issue that's solved by chanting ``install Linux''.
I'd be very surprised if there isn't already a company policy covering this. It may not be getting adhered to in the local office but if there is a policy you need to convince someone -- your boss or whoever it was that seems to have assigned you to this task -- that the policies/procedures need to be followed. If they don't understand that these computers are company resources and need to be looked after, they'll have to be convinced. (Boy, you'll have to be tactful when you do this. :-) ) One should be able to assign a dollar amount to the loss of the data. That'll grab 'em. If you're unable to convince the higher-ups that having business critical information residing on unmanaged computers -- and that it should be centralized to protect it -- isn't a problem, then I'd get that opinion/decision in writing. I'd guess that, one of these days, you'll be held responsible when the next chunk of critical data is lost.
If you get the go-ahead to begin centralizing everyone's files some of the things you'll want to do are:
Another alternative to storing all data on a central server is to purchase something like Legato (or a similar product) that allows you to backup the desktop systems over the network. The drawbacks to this are cost and that employees can no longer turn their systems off at night if they want the data backed up.
Good luck.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
I've actually had this same problem before. What I did was simple. Most programs for Windows default to My Documents as the default folder to save to, so most users use this. Well, if you right-click the My Documents folder on the desktop and get the properties you discover that "My Documents" is a configurable location. So I simply made a share on a central server (Linux running Samba in my case, but an NT server will work just as well :), and created a folder for each user. Then I simply mapped each users "My Documents" folder to the user's folder in the share. They didn't have to change their practices at all but now all I had to do was keep that one server backed up and everything was good.
`fortune -o`
I have been using a software called Second Copy 2000. You should find it at www.centered.com It will backup all your files depending on your preferences, and will keep a log of everything it does. If you have an ftp site you want to back them up to, you can map the ftp site to a drive letter and backup. The program doesnt run as a service by itself, but the instructions to run it as a service are in the help file, and it's very good in a windows environment. good luck mallfouf
From what you say the good news is you have the power because it's you and
you alone. I have some experience of working with people like this, and they
just accept whatever default the computer gives them, usually. So it's not so
much the people's behaviour as the computer's behaviour that decides where
the data goes.
So simply set up a server and make sure each user's file locations are set
correctly, and you should be OK.
Once you've done this, the best way to make sure the users save in the right
place is to use Partition Magic to shrink the size of their local hard disk
partition so it's big enough for the OS, apps and fixed size swap file, and
nothing else. Then when they try to save locally, it says "Not enough disk
space". Almost all users won't know they could use fdisk to create a new
partition in the remaining unpartitioned space on their local disk.
Frankly, having Win98 installed is a bigger risk than a hard drive failing.
Trojans and viruses - lost company data is better than company data being emailed to 10,000 people.
See http://www.moosoft.com for anti-trojan software. (This isn't mean as a commercialisation plug, for there really is nothing anywhere as good as The Cleaner for detecting trojans).
On the workstations use the backup utility to specify which folders to backup. Use the tool to backup to a file on a network share that backs up to tape. It'll be a bit of a maintenance nightmare, but it should work.
IBM hard drives!
http://www.tech-report.com/news_reply.x/3494
I had a similar problem about a month ago. I solved it with BackupPC.
It's written in perl, open-source, runs on Linux. It can backup Windows and Linux clients. Windows clients don't need any special software on the client side, the backup is done using Windows sharing.
Really worth a try.
GFK's
Centralize everything on Linux servers, and rip out the hard drives from the workstations. Make them diskless. Then backup will be on you.
p.s., don't use IBM hard drives:
http://www.tech-report.com/news_reply.x/3494
First of all, understand the psychology here. These aren't users, as users are people who use UNIX. These are lusers. Understand that, and you've solved 50% of the problem.
The other 50% is this... When something breaks, take a long, LONG time fixing it, and every time you're asked when it'll be done, say it's because backups weren't made.
A few years ago, there was this secretary at our shop who had all kinds of important company information on her computer. For my convenience, it was never reproduced in any sort of system backup, no matter how much I begged everyone to make such backup copies. This idiot secretary often installed stupid things on the computer, like screen savers, mouse pointers, unneeded application programs and all kinds of bloat that can't possibly do a computer any good. So one day, some dumbass comes in, hands her a 3+1/2" floppy diskette and says, "Oh, this is so awesome! You've gotta put this on your computer." It was one of those stupid amusements that bored folks forward to their friends through electronic mail. Unknown to her at the time, the aforementioned floppy diskette contained a boot record virus. Somehow, this stupid secretary managed to get the virus onto her hard drive, and following that, all hell broke loose faster than shit going through a tin horn.
When the computer crashed and refused to start up again, I was called to the scene. Already busier than a one-legged man in a butt-kicking contest, having yet another computer go haywire was all I needed, other than Negra Modelo. So I angrily took the computer upstairs to my desk (also known (in my company) as the computer graveyard), removed the cover, and set it on top of about six other disassembled computers, from which I had jacked parts to repair other computers.
During what followed, the secretary kept asking about the status of her computer, and I kept answering that it was an elaborate and complex surgery to remove the virus without damaging her important files. For the time being, she'd have to keep records on paper. In reality, I hadn't touched her computer for two weeks. I had better things to do.
Then, when I was a bit bored one day, I turned the computer on using an old DOS boot diskette I had lying around among my junk, and busted a new MBR onto her hard drive. Then, having become bored, I turned it back off, put it back in the pile, and continued fiddling with FreeBSD's union mounts, which don't work, by the way. Maybe one day, I'll make it a project to figure out why it don't work.
Anyway, back to the story at hand. Another week or so went by, and the secretary's nagging really started getting to me. So I told her I have to find a Windows 98 CD-ROM. Sure enough, within a few days, I had located the aforementioned CD-ROM (it was located in the same box that contained all the manuals and crap for this computer, just like I knew it was to begin with), and actually got around to sticking it in the CD-ROM drive. Windows was up and running within an hour or so, and then I got bored with that again, so I left it alone for a while. I actually have work to do, you know. (FreeBSD is such an AWESOME system. It's sooooooo much fun to fiddle around with it and get it to do neat stuff. Why waste your time fixing people's stupid DOS or Windows computers?)
A few days later, I installed her application programs, and let the computer sit for a few more days, needlessly. Then, after receiving a LOT of nagging, I finally returned it to her, about a MONTH after it happened, and warned her about installing any programs or doing anything weird with the computer, and furthermore, I warned that she MUST back up her data, at least once a week. And sure enough... the computer still works just like I installed it and backups are made every week. It just goes to show.
Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooh well. Maybe I just need another beer.
Don't give 'em enough hard drive space on their PCs to store all their stuff on. If all you have to give them is a 20-gig hard drive, partition it down and make all the partitions but one inaccessible, then fill the remaining partition with so much uninstallable bloatware that they have less than a gig of space to work with. Map two network drives for them, one that is 'personal' (not everyone has access to it, and with limited space so you're not hosting someone's MP3 collection and someone else's photo gallery) and one that is storage space that other people can get to for documents that need shared.
This will only work if you have a decently fast network that is very reliable, and enough hard drive storage on your network to accomodate all the work people would normally store on their PCs. If you implement this, you really don't want to get into this situation. You also need to make sure that your backup system really works--if it fails, you're not gonna have the wrath of one angry user whose computer crashed descending upon you, you're gonna have the entire company sneaking into your house at night to slit your throat...but you didn't write to Slashdot about how to maintain your network, did you?
Denver Isuzu Suzuki
I am not affiliated with them, I am just a satified customer.
For individual users who just need to back stuff up. They have a 1GB space limit (which I assume is internally imposed) so that users cannot back up their ENTIRE drive, but important business data can be. It is fairly customizable too.
http://www.connected.com/products/index.htm
"There are laws that enslave men, and laws that set them free. " - Sean Connery as King Arthur
One way I made this happen was to standardize the desktops. I reformatted all the desktop hard drives and installed one standard configuration on every workstation.
Of course everyone had to move their data to the server otherwise it would be lost. You should help each user with that, to make sure they get everything, and that they put it in the correct locations.
As part of the workstation rebuild, make sure all apps default to saving to the LAN drive, and make sure everyone knows how to use the LAN drives.
Of course server security configuration will be important so people can't access or change what they are not supposed to.
- Eric, InvisibleRobot.com
Encourage users to work on their important files on file servers. If you don't have a file server, get one ... now ... . Once you have a file server in place you should consider more client server applications to enable people to do their work.
Once you architected your IT environment the way you should, add a DAT tape drive in the server and schedule incremental backups.
Hey, xdfgf, where do you get all your stories. I cant find them on the net...
GOD DAMNIT , MODERATE ME!
Make all their machines into thin clients, remove the floppy drives and use terminal services. Nowhere to save dat except the server, backup the server. Easy! ;)
Find an important user, backup his data to CDROM or off in someone elses machine. Now delete the data and walk away.
When this person ask you to fix it, just reload and walk away. When he ask for the data, ask him for his backups.
Problems solved. Everyone will be backing up data.
Real solution, setup a server and have people copy data to that server Backup that data.
You're being set up as the patsy, the guy who will be fired "for cause" and to the relief of the real assholes, the next time things go wrong. And they will go wrong with the parameters you're currently working under.
This is normally a non-winnable situation. All you can do is recommend, in writing, that a central server with good backups be set up, employees instructed to save their work to that server (which is backed up), and that compliance is a line item on their review and (most importantly) you are God and twice a year your job is to "crash" their system and give them a temporary replacement to ensure that they have backed up their files. It is important that you can do this at any time, without challenge, even immediately prior to deadlines and vacations. After all, fires, gas leaks, ceiling collapses, etc. don't follow your business schedule either, and if people know they can cut corners when it matters most they will.
As others have pointed out, this test is actually performed by making an early morning raid and putting a cardboard flame on their box. Part of the test is how long it takes them to report the problem, and if they cheat by turning on the machine (or "losing" the flame) then you have the authority to file a written reprimand with HR for interference with a test designed to verify compliance with policy. This is in addition to a second written reprimand for failing to perform backups, and HR will be instructed to remind the employee that they will be fired "for cause" on a third reprimand. If they're going to expose the company to massive financial loss due to lost files, despite clearly established policy and need, there's no point in keeping them around.
But management won't do that (if they understood how serious this is, you won't have lost data earlier) and you'll be unable to force people to back up their files to a network drive, to keep systems up so a distributed backup will work, etc., and you will be the guy who's fired for failure to follow policy when the next disk crash occurs.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Work your way through the office. Apend a little time with each person. Remove their hard disk and replace with a hard disk with a freshly installed OS on it. Ask them what they want to do next.
After they freak out. Show them how to backup their imporant data - be it on some kind of shared server, NAS, CDROM whatever.
Then, in the middle of the night, format everyone's machines and stick fresh OS installs on all of them. If possible, ghost one machine's fresh install and use it everywhere. Then, the only backup you have to worry about is the H: drive.
You're offloading system administration tasks on the users, and giving them an drop-dead ultimatim. Not cool. No fallback. You'll cause much harm.
Instead try billing it as an "upgrade". That way they'll take any inconvenience as a side-effect of something useful to them, rather than as you deliberately screwing up their data and lives to make your job easier.
Also:
Do it by departments, workgroups, or segments of the cube farm, in stages.
Start with a very small group. You get to work the kinks out with a minimum of trouble if something went wrong, and the group will spread the word to other users on how to ease the transistion. That will let you do larger groups later.
Don't just format their disks. Swap 'em out for fresh ones and keep the old disks handy. Help the users recover any data from the swapped out disks for a few days, check that they've got all they need, maybe back the disks up just in case. THEN format them and swap them IN on the next group of victims.
Make a point of how much extra work you're doing to be SURE they don't lose any important data during the transition (even though you're not doing all THAT much extra). And of course harp on how the main point of the upgrade is to protect their data in the future (which IS true).
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I have dealt with this more times than I choose to recall. I have found that the best way to deal with this problem is to make the solution invisible to the end user. Almost all programs by default will save files to the users home directory (By default this is "c:\My Documents"). If you change each computer so that the default home directory is a shared drive on the server, you greatly reduce your overhead, and this is much easier to do than you would think.
Start by making sure that a home directory is defined for each user account (I don't have a good link for this off of the top of my head, but I can find one if you need
Modify the following script to conform to your network, and place it on your server, and a link to it in the startup folder of each computer.
Restart the computer, and check to see if the P: drive (I use P: for Personal Drive, but you can use whatever you wish) is correctly mapped.
Right click on the My Documents folder and click on properties. In the Target box, enter p:\ then click on OK
Move the contents of the existing My documents folder to the new directory on the server.
In most cases, the end user will not even know the change was made, and most the data is now in one place where it is easy to back up, and make sure does not get lost. You will have to reconfigure some software to use the new default locations, but that should not be too bad.
To make the computers even more hassle free, after you have reconfigured all of the programs to store all of its information on the server, consider installing Deep Freeze on each computer so that no changes can be made to them without approval.
Sample Startnet.bat script
REM This script file logs the WIN 9x computer onto the server from the internal network.
REM This script resides on the server in a public directory, and is run from the startup programs folder
REM Connect to root shared directory /y /home /y /y
net use g: \\server\share
REM Connect to other directories as needed
REM Connect to the users home directory on the server
net use p:
REM Connect to the HP 2200 B&W Laser Printer @ reception
net use lpt1 \\server\hp2200
Sample Startnet.bat script
@ECHO OFF
REM This script file logs the WIN 2k computer onto the server from the internal network.
REM This script resides on the windows 2k/xp computer in the startup programs folder. This needs to be modified for each user
REM Connect to the shared directory that has the 9x script /y domain\userID password
net use x: \\server\share
REM ** Call the Windows 9x script to finish connecting to the server **
x:\startnet.bat
The only solution I've seen mentioned that will work with notebook computers is Retrospect. It has a "backup server" function that will poll the clients to see if they are connected and how long it's been since their last backup. If they are connected and need a backup, then the backup automatically begins. You can backup to your server or tapes. Not a commercial for them, but it's been the best backup I've found for notebooks and lUsers out there. If they're worried about privacy, tell them anything in a folder names "personal" is not backed up, create a filter for it and tell them the leave their personal stuff in a personal folder (and if they lose personal stuff, it's their problem). Plus it runs on OSX and Windows so I can now use one tape library to back up my *nix boxes using ssh, so it's got all my platforms covered. It's made many users happy with me over the years, with little work on my part. If only the danm thing would e-mail me logs, but what do you expect from a GUI app?
I am, and always will be, an idiot. Karma: Coma (mostly effected by
We do the following:
Every user has a home directory either on a Unix server or a Windows file server (merged different areas, so that's why the file servers are different types) We recommend everyone store their data on the file servers, but since at one point our network wasn't the most reliable our windows users have software installed on their system which copies the changes in their my documents directory over to a directory on a file server.
Then all we have to do is worry about the daily backups of the file servers.
The only problem is training the windows users to keep everything in their my documents directory and not on the desktop. We still have people who save stuff to the desktop no matter how many times we have told them not to.
Hear hear, I will say what others fear to say: Do NOT buy TRAVAN TAPES. Do not buy TRAVAN. Do not buy ONSTREAM. They sucker you with the cheap drive - expensive tape philosophy, except the mechanisms are UTTER SHIT. You will get burned if you buy a cheap tape drive.
You _tell_ them. You can't be nice about it. Have the BOSS issue a letter telling them "do this or else".
Display some adaptability.
This is much easier than some of the more well thought out comments here. Here is my recipe for making sure that users save all their data to the network for backup.
1. Setup file server.
2. Ensure there is a drive(s) mapped on the workstations that people can save to.
3. Send out an e-mail talking about how your weekend went, include a bit of data related to what you do, and make a quick remark about saving to the new mapped drives.
4. Stay late one Friday about a week after the e-mail went out and walk around the office and delete no less than 10 important documents from each PC.
5. Empty all recycle bins.
You can now kick back for a couple of weeks and enjoy the mayhem and the sweet satisfaction of being able to tell them 'I told you so'. You can get bonus points for deleting mission critical application data and being able to blame a co-worker for being incompetant.
Hope that helps.
For this small number of machines all you need is a copy of Retrospect Workgroup ($400) and an AIT2 tape drive ($1200). This is really simple to do. There are wizards that walk you thorugh the whole process. And you can set it up to happen at night when nobody is there.
I'm not much up on Win2k right now but at work it they've got it figured out. Each user has a roaming profile, which might not be usefull in your case. However, everyone's 'My Documents' folder is actually on a network share. It's also local, but it's sync'd when on the network. It's solved some problems we were having with the remote users and now the help-desk can use any desk with their familiar stuff. Plus, everything is backed up by automated tasks on the server.
You can do the same thing with linux or bsd of course.
An easier method than POL EDIT (YMMV)
In regedit go find two keys
Hkey current user\software\microsoft\windows\current version\explorer\shell folders
Hkey current user\software\microsoft\windows\current version\explorer\user shell folders
In these two keys you will find a key called personal which is a pointer to my documents.
Modify them both to suit your needs.
Then export both those keys to a reg file.
Next go round to each pc and double click on the reg file while the user is logged in (or put in a login script).
This will import the new setting into the registry and you can point my documents anywhere you want.
Under NT 4 I'have had to modify both keys. If I only modify one then the settings do not seem take.
Or you can set this up on new winders deploys. This works on NT 4/2000/XP. Load c:\winnt\profiles\default user\ntuser.dat with regedt32
Change the above two keys and unload default user.
Result is that anyone who has not logged into the box before will inheret these settings.
(makes me sick that I know all this crap )
-- Spammers: My E-mail server is in California. Consider yourself warned.
Any regular processing that requires human intervention is setting
yourself up for failure, not setting yourself up for success. People
are people, and we all forget things. Working late, bleary eyed, the
best of us can forget to "copy files to the network server for back."
Suggestions as to have users sign papers to say I know I need to back
up, and if I don't it's my fault, yada yada are bad too. That's not
solving the problem, that CYA. Lame.
Workstation backup isn't that hard. If you totally lose a drive, all
you need to restore it are the app and OS binaries, and the user's
data. The app and OS are on CD's, so those serve as backups for that,
so it's the user's data we need to focus on.
Designate a few folders to back up. E.g. where-ever email is stored,
the desktop, a user folder (if it's in windows, Documents and Settings
is a good one, as a lot of programs default things to save in there.
if it's unix, just make it the user's home directory). You don't need
to backup the entire drive. In fact, that's more than likely a waste,
except in a few cases.
Users can easily understand the should work in a specified folder or
folders underneath that folder. This doesn't require an additional
step (it's still just saving), it's a matter of where they're saving.
Are there hypothetical holes still? Sure. Do they happen in practice
that often (if ever)? Not really. If you're super paranoid (or super
diligent, depending on how you look at it), you can write a process
that looks for modified files outside the targeted back up region. If
it's a file common on a lot of machines, it's probably a standard file
(e.g. a config, preference, etc.), and you can most likely whitelist
those. Others could notify yourself (or the user) via email, and
politely ask that they move it if it is to be backed up.
Lastly, *test* *your* *setup*. This cannot be emphasized enough. You
don't need to delete a user file or anything dumb like that. Just
ask someone to name a random important file, and confirm you can
restore it to a different drive. Or pretend your production server
just crashed and you need to bring it back.
This has two key advantages: 1) obviously confirms your setup works,
2) lets you get comfortable with the restore process in a non-stressed
manner, which things going wrong is okay. You don't want to be trying
to figure it out when you're already stressed out because things have
gone horribly wrong.
Anyway, HTH.
-Bill
SlashSig Karma: Excellent (mostly affected by moderatio
PROBLEM --- " how do I get people to back up their files to our file server so I can back up our data from one location?" RESTATED PROBLEM -- Users are saving data locally and not backing up to the file server. THUS don't rely on them find a product to automatically copy it to the server for you.
I'm sure that based on what has happened at your company, all of the users realize how important it is that they make their data available for backup. I don't think you're going to get any resistance from your users at this point.
There are two things I would suggest to you that are fairly standard, based on my experience. The first are home directories. You can configure these via User Manager, and the users simply get another drive letter. Instruct the users that all of their files MUST be saved to their home directories. Emphasize to them that saving to a home drive is as easy as saving to a C:\ drive. While you are implementing this solution, check the individual home directories to make sure they're being used. You can also map their My Documents folder to their home drive. Any unshared data should be saved to the home drive.
The second thing I would suggest is to setup a departmental shared drive. You can map this drive in a logon script, which is fairly easy to do. All shared data should be saved to this drive. Create folders for each department so that the data is organized and so that you can monitor whether or not your users are complying with your request.
As far as backing up workstations, don't do it. This is not a sustainable way to backup your data. What happens when your quadruple your number of workstations? You're quadrupling your backup licensing cost, your backup drive and media costs and your time spent managing backups. Furthermore, you're backing up a bunch of identical Windows and Program Files directories that don't contain data needing backup. You need to put responsibility for saving data on the users, not on yourself. I would strongly suggest you get management's buy-in on this.
In terms of backup programs, I would recommend Veritas Backup Exec. It isn't perfect, but it's the easiest and best app out there in my opinion. ARCServe is the nearest competitor, and its a piece of junk.
Hope this is helpful.
I'm actually serious.... I was in the same situation and people kept lapsing back into their old habits. I had tried all the tricks, move My Documents, setup roaming profiles, gave everyone a P: drive (personal) but there were a few older applications that made it difficult to save their datafiles somewhere besides the locations apparently hard coded in.
I pleaded and swore and I posted a big memo about about it and waited. On the second night after everyone had left I replaced one of the more irritating higher ups machine with a faster one. I put the old one on the bench and completely tore it apart. Since we had roaming profiles he had most of his stuff working but he had lost data. I restored his files a few hours later after feigning concern that I might not be able to and making him look foolish for saving files on his local drive. He was seriously pissed, but unable to do anything about it since he got the new computer and had been recently warned about local data.
Now I occasionally play musical computers with the 18 systems in my office just to keep them on their toes.
The prob I still have is getting people to shut down all their apps and log out every night. I've tried those auto logout scripts but they shut things dpown too hard sometimes and people often work late here so they're kinda rude.
Has anyone tried the Quantum Snap Server 1000 with it's "automatic file backup" client?
Not a true ghosting, but might be more appropriate in the situation where you lack the authority for more draconian measures...
http://www.quantum.com/Products/NAS+Servers/Snap+S erver+2200/Technical+Information/Specifications.ht m
One of my jobs is to create a backup policy. I don't backup individual workstations because it would limit my other jobs.
...he/she will agree.
If all work and all data is saved to a network drive then it is backed up. I am responsible for reminding people of this policy and I do that quite well without being a jerk.
Before I came along, this was not the policy and data got lost. I convinced the boss to adopt it by asking weighted but true questions:
1. Would you rather have all of our essential data on one drive, backed up on one tape, and the responsibilty of one person or would you rather have all of YOUR data on many machines with many people responsible for backups.
2. If anyone gets any bright ideas that I should be able to backup all the machines then I would ask if that was the only job they wanted me to do and hire others for networking and troubleshooting. Be prepared with some stats on what tasks you perform during the day and the amount of time and effort it takes to backup every users machines.
3. When the "what if" scenario comes up. Allow an exception but make it known that you are in charge of the decision to allow the exception. Point out that the boss is probably too busy
4. I have only turned down one request to back up files that were not on the network drive, because the request is made so rarely. I also give out CDRs and CDRW's for users to back up their own stuff if they want.
I assume every situation is different but emphasising the time, money, reliabilty of this setup without being a jerk works quite well for me and the users.
Linux Journal had an article some time ago (Sorry I don't remember when) showing how to automate this with a nightly cron job on a samba server. The server should have a large second drive that is not mounted by default. The cron script mounts the drive, mounts the remote workstation to be backed up, then zips all of the files to a directory on the drive. Once done, it unmounts the remote workstation and unmounts the drive where the backups are. The advantage to this is that if the server crashes or fails, the backup drive is only mounted for the duration of the backups and will not suffer file system inconsistencies. You can even use a FAT filesystem so that the drive can be physically removed and installed into a workstation to restore files.
1. Make a letter that specifies EXACTLY what to do to back up the data.
2. Tell the bastards that if they want to have a job, they will do it.
3. First person that fails to back up, gets fired. PERIOD.
If you can't setup a charter / policy and have consequences to actions then you should not work there(if your hired) or you should fire the incompetent employees.
the answer is "you don't". You don't have them back it up and you don't keep the only back-up on-site. You can use an automated backup program, but then it has to be somebody's job to check on the automated system regularly to be sure it is functioning correctly. Many people have gone to their auto-backups and found nothing there. So you set it up for users to be backed up automatically to your server, and your server is then backed-up regularly, and those backups are rotated out to another building so your business is not destroyed if the building burns down. The copies that are rotated off-site should NOT be compressed; they should be full back-ups of all data and associated information like passwords.
"Several weeks ago we lost six years' worth of extremely important data on current and continuing projects that not even a data recovery service could get back. As a consequence, it is now my job to make sure this doesn't happen again. I have an offsite data storage service retained, but now, how do I get people to back up their files to our file server so I can back up our data from one location? (Also, having the data backed up on our file server of course means that most inadvertent deletions can quickly be fixed in-house).
Now, I know that an all-winders shop was part of the spec, but I really haven't seen anything that works as well as BackupPC, including some expensive proprietary packages.
BackupPC is a set of very nice Perl scripts and modules that uses Samba to connect to your Winders machines and back up their data to a 'data pool' on the BackupPC server's hard drive. It can be configured to run the backups at night, and will run the backup during the day if it missed the nightly due to the user shutting their machine off or taking their laptop home. It also uses MD5 hashes to check for duplicate files and will make hard links instead of duplicates in order to save space on the server's drive. You can set it up to access client machines via the hidden shares, i.e. C$; there's no software to load on the clients. User data can also be compressed, or just stored on the server's drive as plain files. Makes restoring a snap, and you don't have to worry about aging tapes or corrupted backup databases.
BackupPC as far as I know only works well when the server is running on Linux, as it depends on samba, tar, Apache, etc. Setting it up is easy for someone with a Linux/Unix background, but it can be a learning process for someone new to Linux and Perl.
Did I mention it was free?
include $sig;
1;
use SystemUp at www.systemup.net
it runs as a service, so the user doesn't have to be logged in. Encrypts and compresses the files as well. Works under all versions of Windows.
** Curb Your Enthusiam **
All you need are three free things:
I created a simple batch program for use under Win 2000 that uses infozip to create a zip file of all the important directories on the system. After the zip is created, it ftps to my linux machine and trades zip files. This batch file is then run by the administrator using Scheduled Tasks.
There is a corresponding cron job on the linux box to create zips of the user accounts and other special directories (/etc, /var/www, /local). The Win 2000 machine gets them after dropping off its zip file.
This shouldn't take too long to create for just about any situation.
Upgrade all your Win98 users to 2000. Create a Win2k server (times two) and create a domain rather than a work group. Install MS SMS (yeecchhhh I had a hard time saying that). You can now backup your users systems without their knowledge or approval. Don't let them use encryption built into Win 2K without the requirement of an administrative password. Create fileservers where it is 'better' for users to store work related files. By a good network backup product, there are several, but you can start with just scripts administratively mounting peoples drives and backing them up. Check out sysinternals for some tools you'll need to survive. Pray to your deity often.
...
Better yet, move to Mac OS X or Linux (not that that will happen)
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
For small and home offices without a server and tape drive, I have had good luck with a CDRW drive and Stomp Backup MyPC software. A predefined backup job can be scheduled or manually started by the user. While CDRW are not large enough in capacity to back up an entire system, it's good for backing up My Documents, email and Quickbooks data. Another option would be to have them work in a terminal server session running on a server at HQ over a WAN link. This requires a more complicated printer setup and is no good for running mission-critical apps because we all know WAN lines are not always up.
i like the snap drive with their special software, i don't remember what it's called but it works reallllly well and has saved my ass muchos times
If your NT 4.0 file server is a BDC( which should probably be the case ), go into the user administration tool and double click on the users one by one and add at the bottom where you have a choice and can select a drive letter, select for instance H: and then map it to \\\users\%USERNAME%. This will create a directory for each user on the server. Then all you have to say to your users is to save all data to that drive and voila. Simply make sure that the backup on the server also backs up the users folder. And all your users data will be backed up. Send the backup to an offsite location and you have just implemented a good backup plan.
Cyberdrek dcedilotte@gmail.com
... what i did was network em, then i moved their "my documents" folders to the server where i could back them up.
most windows users put ALL their stuff in "my documents" tho, so youll find downloaded apps & stuff in there too, it wasnt hard to throw together a batch file to search for the exe's & wipe em out tho.
Hell, save some money and administration headache. Run it on linux with samba.
... but this actually *does* happen - quite often - where I work.
We got a batch of bad drives (Fujitsu, 40Gb, comes with IBM 300PLs 6565 and 6566), and now have two or three "spare" PCs built and ready to go. Downtime is down to about an hour. We've managed to "engineer" some recoveries, but not everyone is so lucky.
More to the point, users don't learn, even when real problems happen. There are a handful who have learned and back up whenever they hear about a HD crash (hopefully you see the flaw in that logic).
Winners tell stories while losers yell deal.
We have no CIO, no IT department, and no policies whatsoever as regards data retention or backup.
Forget backups. Sounds like they could care less what happens to you. Show them you don't care either
OK, yes, you've covered all the sysadmin geeky things you can do for file backup.
But there's something much more important in the long run. (Granted my following point is about document retention, not just 'backups.')
Keep REALLY GOOD PAPER RECORDS! Seriously, most of your users' most valuable information is in some simple document form. Documents they wrote up for customers. Financial documents. Have an appropriate person (lackey, with operations manager supervision) collect the most valuable documents, make sure they're printed and filed in triple, and send them off to Iron Mountain and two other safe places.
We'd love to think that digital media is the most portable, flexible, yadda yadda. Well, it is...sorta. But it's also quite fragile. Sadly, there probably WILL be Word 97 translators out there in the year 2020...but they'll probably be sorta crappy. Paper records are really quite valuable.
Oh, and you think 2020 is far off? Ever do legal research? Read up on deeds and stuff? Documents need to last a long time.
Get a *nix box with samba installed on the network and use the -T option of smbclient, eg: //PC1234/c$ -U Administrator%foo -d0 -Tc - | gzip > PC1234.tgz
smbclient
from man smbclient:
-T tar options
smbclient may be used to create tar(1) compatible back-
ups of all the files on an SMB/CIFS share.
Novell, where I worked until recently, has a product called iFolder that works well for this. Basically, it provides a client that can copy from the client to the server in a lazy fashion whenever the client is attached to the internet (not just the office net)... it uses RSA encryption and has passphrase, key recovery, conflict resolution, all kindza good stuff. The client policies are all server controlled.
h tm l
The server runs on Linux (Red Hat only, officially), Windows, and NetWare. Client is Windows only. Specs here:
http://www.novell.com/products/ifolder/sysreqs.
Unfortunately, the price is idiotic. $50 a seat. You get a stripped down version free with NetWare 6, but it doesn't have the features you need to make it work well. Novell has had bad pricing for years, probably because the same product managers who made the dumb pricing decisions before are still there.
But, if the price drops you might want to check it out, it's a great solution for roaming users with laptops.
I've also used Second Copy from Centered http://www.centered.com/ . It's pretty good stuff. Allows you to set a backup policy for copying stuff up to a server. My biggest complaint, which may be fixed now, is that there didn't seem to be an easy way to do an automated roll out of the client. But, you just set the copy policy, set it to copy to a mapped drive, and let it go. More configuration setting than you could imagine, although it does require you to have a drive mapping and not a simple IP connection like iFolder.
- "When you want something with all your heart, the entire universe conspires to give it to you" -Paulo Coelho
I have one office client on a WinNT 4 network..simple PDC (Proliant 1850) and BDC. A VERY CHEAP solution we set up.
The BDC (Proliant 1500) runs a RAID 5 35GB on the side, and I have a mirror of the User directories from the fileserver under special backup directories for each user. Each desktop has been configured with a C: and D: partition. ALL user data including some apps like Eudora get installed there. My Documents points there by default...manually. I have batch scripts scheduled to run once a week with a shortcut on the desktop in case they forget to leave their system on.
The entire D: drive gets backed up, and if the computer gets freaky then I can image the bugger by writing over the C: partition when need be without killing existing data on the D: (we're on a 10 BaseT so it's faster than restoring everything).
The Backup (BDC) server is backed up to a tray mounted IDE 40GB hard drive every week and it then travels home with the office manager to be replaced by tray drive number two...the switcheroo is run every week.
Works great and very cheap...except the RAID ($4800)...running on a rebuilt Proliant 1500 DP.
Works like a charm.
I had a similar problem at the school I work for. We have a central file server running Vertias backup exec. Gave everyone a "home" directory on the server and mapped the drive via login script. I told everyone to put all their documents there....and of course some people didn't do that.
So I forced the issue by installing Fortres on every machine and locked down the user's ability to save files locally....so if they want to save the document, they need to save it on the server. I am also running the central control module to easily push out changes to the workstations.
I thought about using roaming profiles (Windows 2000/NT/9x required), but they are a pain in the ass. Some local apps don't like the roaming profile thing, and the file synchronization on login and logoff was killing our network bandwidth (as well as annoying the users with really long login/logout times.)
Hope this helps.
-ted
Every time I've gotten a new management job I've made a point to immediately do three things:
/etc/issue (/etc/issue.net) and incorporate into your policy doc you can legally monitor, insult or denigrate the mothers of script kiddies who hit your system.
1) Draft an acceptable use policy
2) Draft a development policy
3) Draft a security policy
#1 had all the usual disclaimers (we (the company) own the computers, etc., etc.). Even if you don't like them on the surface they at least give you the legal right to punish them for being script kiddies, using up bandwidth for porn (ie blocking the admin from getting his porn), etc... and, if you properly craft a MOTD and
#2 equals "Fuck you, you WILL use CVS". Saves a lot of headache in the long run.
#3 means you get to do what you want, security-wise. It's important to be able to say "no, you can't get executable email" or "yes, your're fired for giving out your password" or "yes, you have to use an uncommon combination of at least eight characters for your passwords" and have A POLICY DOC TO BACK YOU UP.
Draft a good, easy-to-read version of the above and you'll be fine (and, oh yeah, convince the management to adopt it).
You could hide their local drive(s) and only show the network/group drives in explorer. This will force your users to use the network drive by not giving them an option!!!
Why try to change the people way of working? You will only find the resistance to change and will make things run less smoothly. Solution: Users should only care about puting all their files into a local directory (shared as backup) and launch a script that copy all the files in local directory and synchronise to a removable HD for offsite backup. Is this making sense for you?
Tomorrow is another day...
My company uses it internally, as well as on clients' networks. It is the only reasonable solution we are aware of that does NOT depend on end users doing the "right thing". It is just about flawless, and does not take a highly trained professional to administer. Highly Recommended!
Ah....but who will Moderate the Meta Moderators?
If the solution you chose require workers to change their habits, you will be confronted to the resistance of change.
SOLUTION
Share a folder (ex.: backup) on each workstation and tell your staff to move their data into this directory so you can script a network backup that start automatically at 5 pm...
Is it making sense for your situation ?
Tomorrow is another day...
check out www.merlintechnologies.com.
They have a cool lookig Cube (stainless steel) that has a very easy interfce to use and an integrated backup solution you can use that is called EssentialServer.
It is designed to be simple and powerful. it supports Windows, Macs and Linux. and comes with a CD burner, tape drive for backups and 2 or more hard drives for hard drive redundancy incase one of the drives dies. it is inexpensive as well.
One of the big problems with Windows is that there's no standard home directory. Microsoft apps save everything to My_Documents, other apps to wherever they feel like. Even worse, sometimes it's really hard to find where an app has saved its files becuase the directories are cryptically named. Then you have the problem of people moving their data to places that make more sense, and other people moving them to somewhere else entirely.
More than once I've had to rescue a small business who moved their Quickbooks data into My_Documents, then their accountant worked on it and saved it back to the original location. Anyone who's worked with Quickbooks knows what a mess this is- you can't just merge the two files. It's back to square one- sometimes with weeks' worth of data!
If Microsoft and Windows developers would just standardize one one home directory, it would make everyone's lives a lot easier.
Yes. A word of advice: don't fuck with poledit on a Novell network. That causes trouble with multiple login servers. Been there, done that. Unlike NT, where you have a dedicated domain controller where everyone and his brother logs into, in novell, if you have your .POL file in SYS:PUBLIC\, it will look for it on that logon server... forever. It becomes "sticky" in the registry. Note that this applies only to Win9x clients. With Novell use ZENWorks.
.reg file out to the clients to fix Office's default "My Documents" folder.
Of course, I think when you logon to an NT domain, an environment variable like %HOMEDRIVE% and %HOMEDIR% are created, so programs like Office create your My Documents folder in %HOMEDRIVE%\My Documents. If you have lots of Win9x clients you could probably (albeit more difficult) set up a Samba server with users/passwords and create Username$ shares for all the users. Map a few drives, make them persistent connections, and just push a
Of course if everyone was running Windows 2000 you could just use Group Policy, which I might add is the bomb diggity, yo.
I have written a little .bat file that xcopies a directory on the users drive. I just put the bat file in the scheduled task and have it run every day. Of course there are some problems, i.e. .pst files and other files in use can not be copied, but the script opens a command window and alerts the user it is doing a back up. This way they have time to close Outlook, word etc.. saved my ass plenty of times. The trick is to partition the users drive, create a directory named "data", then create directorys corresponding to the various apps underneath. Then point all of their apps to the respective directories so their files are always easy to find. You also have the added benefit of being able to recover data when Windows fails...just format the c: drive and it all on the other partition.
ymmv
I do this in my job; the argument that my users have that working locally vs on the lan is a valid one, they work on (sometimes) 20-200 mb files, so network bandwidth becomes an issue. Working locally on a 200 mb file whups ass on working over the lan, even switched 100baseT DX. I just have some big honkin 70 gig cheetah's run on the fileserver, and I establish with the user where is a good place to use their data (cad users, marketing geeks think different so we have to accomodate them) then every night I schedule tasks on the fileserver that runs a batch file using the best copy utility ever: robocopy, from the NT resource kit. Here's that batch file: robocopy \\joeblow\c$\work_folder c:\backup\joeblow\ /s /e /purge /r:1
Run it for every workstation and you then have a hard disk image in the Backup folder of everyone's work. Then just back it up on the DLT.
I also use robocopy to great effect to use spare disk space on the new Dell's we got for "hot spares" of data - copy all the accounting data periodically thru the day to an accountant's spare 30 gigs on his 40 gig drive. That way, they delete a spreadsheet I can automagically dredge it up in 30 seconds flat - sure beats getting out the DLT.
Robocopy synchronizes directories, skipping files that it already has with the same timestamp, so it is thrifty on network bandwidth.
We run our workstations 24/7 anyway, so they are always online. Lots of guys go in a 11 or 12 at night to work, and they hate waiting for Win 2k to start, so we leave 'em hot all the time.
Last thing: Document the shit out of the whole process, and make damn sure that you have a hot spare, last night's hard disk backup, and a good tape backup of *really* critical data like the payroll :-)
In our office we use TLM for backing up all the individual PCs. It is non intrusive, runs at background at admin defined intervals. If you turn the machine off, it'll automatically run next time you turn it on (if the schedule is missed). It takes incremental backup and you can configure drive/directories not to backup. It proved useful to us.
NetWorker would work for you. Install the client on the user's machines and have a central backup machine. The server can be almost any current OS.
Try and get it to be company policy that backups are to be performed (ie users not shut their machines off or remove the client)
Use the monitoring features to see who's backups are not completing and go find out why. The data on the computers is property of the company, not the user...if they have a problem with that then they shouldn't have personal stuff on their work machines.
(sorry for anon coward, messed up my /. account, too lazy to fix it)
:
...).
This is how I solved the problem
First backup their files (documents and Mboxes) onto their home folders on the server. Next insert the first CD of your favourite Linux distro into their CD-ROM drives, follow the instructions, be sure to leave no traces of the old OS (Mac, Windows,
Be sure to install Evolution and StarOffice/OpenOffice too. Choose a fast, easy to understand file manager (read ROX-Filer), get your Mime types right, make nice icons for all mime types. Make sure the desktop looks good ! Check mime types for Web Browser ! Install a good media player ! Make sure they can play their audio CD's ! Install Tux Racer ! Install Eric's Ultimate Solitaire !
Next do mkdir ~/MyDocuments, next link the new folder to the desktop, configure apps to use this folder by default. Make a bash script that copies ~/MyDocuments and ~/evolution to their home folders on your server. Make a crontab to execute the script any time between 02 a.m. and 04 a.m.
Next tell them you have installed a new system, (do *not* mention the word Linux !), take some time to explain them where to click and how to move/copy stuff to their MyDocuments folder, tell them that everything outside this folder will be deleted automatically. Tell them how to log in, and how to log out when they leave. Do *not* tell them how to shut down their machines !
And voila, you will have peace at last, no more data loss, no more virusses, no more crashes. As simple as that !
I speak with the voice of experience. Until recently, I was the network administrator in a similar situation ... VERY similar.
Trust me, friend -- the only way to keep your sanity is to set up home directories for users on the file server, make regular backups of said home directories ("at" works nicely with Window$ operating systems) and make it known that you will NOT be responsible for ANY data on local hard drives!
You need to state the latter message often, because people not only forget, but new people coming in to the organization need to be made aware.
Frankly, the only proper way to do this is with a good, well-written policy -- and policy is not your responsibility, it's upper management's job. If you are in a place where upper management cannot be made interested in creating a policy (as I was) then you then need to do what I did: start looking for another job.
I'm really, really glad I'm no longer aboard that ship of fools....
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth gets you modded -1 Troll
Better make sure permanent data is going onto tape. /or never tested restoration procedures.
So many co's Assume a tape thats 5 years old, still performs like a new one, and
Or a place with 100,000 tapes >15 years old, now realizes it has issues. CD's even flake out, bad batches - just try to claim that lifetime guarantee.
Maybe the person should say disaster recovery. Only IBM has the real SMS.
Retrospect on the PC has a weird interface. On the plus side, it is the only backup software I know of that can encrypt (DES). Encryption is necessary; you don't want to have to put CD and tape backups in the safe. Note that DES encryption is safe; password protection is not safe.
Dantz was just sold; it is unclear whether the company has management smart enough to coordinate the continued development of a technical product. I've seen some evidence that makes me think the company is very light on technical understanding.
This is all my opinion, of course.
As many will have their whole HD shared, their data will quickly be "backuped" all over the place, and voilà !
We just got a laptop drive (and a bill) back from Ontrack after a VP lost his load on the road. It only takes one or two such lessons before getting such a spend approved...
Free the West Memphis Three!
For several years, Veritas Backup Exec was my choice for the worst software I'd ever seen. It had a database system that sometimes took 20 minutes (20 minutes, not seconds!!!) to find a record. Communication from Veritas acknowledged this; people would otherwise think their computers were broken.
Maybe the other software they sold was better, but Backup Exec was worse than any shareware or freeware I'd ever seen. (However, I'm picky about what I download.)
Backup Exec (which was originally sold by Seagate) was worse than HP backup software (originally from Colorado Memory), one version of which littered hard drives with zero length files. Yes, HP backup software actually WROTE to the hard drive. The file names were names of actual files in other folders. An HP technical support person tried to convince me that this was not such a bad bug.
Another specialty of Backup Exec was incomprehensible error messages.
I agree, forget tape; there are too many cases where it is a write-only media.
A lot of people who say they like their backup software have never done tests to see if they can get the data back. Try restoring to another drive and doing a byte-for-byte compare. You will be amazed at how often backups are not really backups.
In my opinion, there is no important class of software that is as poor as backup software. The software that should be the best is the worst! The reason appears to be that only about 1% of customers actually test their backups to see if they work. What most people accept as good backup software is a slick interface and reassuring backup progress messages.
Note: My info about Veritas is old; quite obviously I would not want continued experience with the company.
Response to your sig: U.S. government violence is different from other violence. U.S. gov. violence helps create peace. (Anyone who buys this may also be interested in buying this: The Brooklyn Bridge.
Would that be "less intrusive" then ?
Worse yet, Windows XP puts user files and temporary files in the same folder!!
For example:
C:\Documents and Settings\DavidR\Local Settings\Temp
and
C:\Documents and Settings\DavidR\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files
along with
C:\Documents and Settings\DavidR\My Documents
It's mind-boggling why Microsoft does this. Maybe it makes it easier for the CIA or NSA.
Note to those who have always worked with Unix: MS Windows is worse than you've heard.
I actually think many of the other comments, to the effect of "re-educate your users to only use their network drives", embody the best philosophy in this area. However, as this may be impractical for you, or if you have exceptions (e.g. paranoid managers who refuse to put "sensitive data" on a network share), you could add this to your mix:
.doc, .xls) to a local location on the server (use the /M switch to only get changed files, more or less)
t ent/638/14/1.h tml
- Share out the users' hard drives, using whatever security you think is appropriate
- Write a simple script (batch file) that does a "net use" to each user drive in turn, and then does an "xcopy" of all files ending in the appropriate extensions (e.g.
- Schedule the script to run at some appropriate time, like 7:00 at night
- Put tape over the power buttons on the workstations to remind the users not to turn them off
Also, this article has some decent suggestions:
http://www.windowsitlibrary.com/Con
Good luck to you.
(Note: I expect flames from certain loser boneheads to the effect of "that solution is stoopid/insecure/unreliable/karmically imbalanced". Said loser boneheads are, of course, entitled to their own loser bonehead opinions. However, this kind of solution works just fine for many small offices, in my experience.)
that always when one sets up a backup scheme one has to make sure that the data is backed up correctly and can be restored without fuss, and that the backup tapes (or whatever you use) are safe from harm.
At our company we change a random tape in the robot once a week, taking it home or into the office (we have all of our servers at a colo site).
Also make a restore of random data from the tapes at least once a week. Restore a couple of database tables into a temp database and check them for consistency. There are too many sysadmins out there who blindly trust that what their backup software's telling them is the truth.
Its really cool as it has a built in delta block type technology (FastBIT) which will only upload the changed blocks in a file so if you make a few changes in a 300Mb file only the changes are uploaded which reduces the backup time a lot. What is also useful about this is that it allows you to restore a file from any previous backed up version.
You can also get an open file plugin for it so that it can backup open files such as active databases and exchange files without first closeing the applications.
Well if you want further information on it then take a look at www.monsterbackup.com.
I dont think thay have the prices on the site but if you are interested then just email them the support we have had so far has been superb.
They are also running a free 30 day tril at the moment.
The The Practice of System and Network Administration, Thomas A Limoncelli and Christine Hogan
It was reviewed on Slashdot a while back and provides great advice about setting up systems and policies.
Windows: NT Domain logon. win98 users can safely save stuff to "my documents", desktop, etc and its all transparently mirrored on the server and backed up. Pretty sure its much the same for win2k.
:-) (well I expect so)
Linux/Unix: duh! homedir over snfs
MacOS 9: A really, really, big stick is needed, combined with readily accessable, easy network storage. One thing that helps is turning off any local file sharing services on the machines so if they want to exchange files, they've got to use the server. Training, repetition. Big sticks. I just had a graphical demonstration that made getting the newspaper out on time a nightmare - and I didn't even have to arrange it. Downside: 48hours straigt at work. I hate macs. It ate its own hdd (directory corruption).
Alternately you can netboot the macs and lock them down pretty tight etc I think but this is beyond my experience.
MacOSX: see Unix/Linux
force all of ur users to use win2k and impose GPT to store all of files on server. Or if u use opensource(linux) server, there is a good backup packages out there on sourceforge, u can use that with samba.
:-)
hope it helped
I've just started using PowerQuest DriveImage. It lets me backup a non-system drive across a network, unattended. Could be worth a look.
Never, ever lose a file again. Ever.
Suresync is what you need.
Its a small program that automatically copies files from the client box to a server. Obviously you'll need a meaty server to store all those C:\My Documents\My Cat.bmp files!
I evaluated replication tools for a different kind of task, so chose not to use it, but for what you want it sounds ideal.
If they leave their workstations on overnight, you can back them up using amanda and samba - samba provides the smbtar functionality just for this purpose.
Of course, you'll need to spend some cash on a tape robot - and with the size of many peecee drives these days, you may need a big one.
Fair enough. Provided your job description doesn't require you to be a sysadmin wizard, then ask your management for the budget to hire one as a consultant to help you put together a reliable backup solution (selection of products to use, file placement rules, drawing up procedures for backup and restoration, documenting it and providing user education, etc.). The solution should be one which doesn't require the users to do anything more than follow a few simple and well-documented guidelines, and preferably it should make their life massively easier if they do follow these guidelines rather than do their own thing. You should be able to sell this to your management by pointing out that the cost of a professional solution will be small compared with the lossage if the current situation continues (from what you say, they've already learnt this the hard way). Sell it to the users as a desirable upgrade that will make their lives easier and safer.
Do insist that you get to work with the hired consultant as the solution is specified - that way the consultant gets warned of any 'gotchas' that may be special to your local setup, and you get to learn properly how the solution works so you can modify it to meet new requirements that will come along in the future. Choose a consultant who has the right attitude and you'll also get a valuable lesson in how to build such solutions. And last, but by no means least, if there's a massive screwup and the solution breaks, you may be able to transfer at least some of the blame ;-)
Good luck.
The point is that MS Windows has a complicated, poorly explained directory structure that requires you to understand the structure to do complete backups.
If management does not care enough to put in a proper IT infastructure, nor tell its people to back up their data, then it will probably not support the kind of automated backup system you need. Get management buy-in first! Make management understand how much of their money is in jeopardy, then you will get backups.
Pure big odorous SHIT.
There can be a ton of reasons to migrate from Win9x to NT-based series, but yours one definetly is *not* one of them.
It's not needed. With Win9x clients a Samba server and poledit you can achieve exactly the same result.
You'd want WinNT on stations if access security is an issue for you, but not because that kind of manageability.
Do your homework, man!
That's not easier than poledit, but poor's man poledit.
Now, your users still can change registry values to whatever they want to and you still need to go through each PC (let's say 2000 boxes on 50 offices through the country) each time you need to add/change anything else (let's say, new Office in town).
to convince them, then you're definately not going to scare them into doing the right thing. You'll have to, as many others have stated already, create a policy that stores all their "my documents" data on the (whatever*nix) RAID'ed, redundant power supplied, UPS'ed, tape backed-up and fully documented SMB server. No need to get all those NT client licenses and over-spec'd machines if you dont need to, that'll make you look even more golden.
And remember the documentation, the best Sys_admin that I have worked with made sure that everyone had a folder that explained, in layman's terms, all the procedures and settings for using a workstation on the network from where to save files to how to set up email clients and browser settings. Make sure they read it and understand it, it'll save everyone's arses and time in the long run and will ensure that you can go on holiday or take a sick day without getting called every 5 minutes.
shared by default. it is accessibly only by administrators.
your C drive is shared as C$ (and accessed by typinh \\computername\C$ at the run prompt
(1) make sure you own an admin account on each machine
(2) make sure there are shares on each drive, (you may have to configure the win95 machines)
(3) write a script (your choice what type you write, perl, batch file, VBScript ) that downloads important directories from the users computer in the background (at night) choose "mydocumants" and "desktop" by default
Comment removed based on user account deletion
_Buy_ a desktop backup product!
v io
:-).
They work by backing up all the files on each desktop that are "unique". Thus throughout your whole network only one copy of Win98, one copy of Office, one copy of the pr0n you have stashed and one copy of each document, spreadsheet and email file etc will be backed up.
The backups are to disk on the 'desktop backup server', which in turn is (should be) backed up to tape using a conventional backup product.
Vendors offering desktop backup products (often called laptop backup products as they work particularly well with laptops) include -
Veritas (NetBackup Professional)
Brightstor
Legato
Connected
Pre
Do it now and protect your data
My suggestion would be to use a decent remote backup software (Retrospect, perhaps) and (given a generic one-drive PC) set it up to back up the My Documents folder, the C:\winnt\profiles directory, and everything in c:\ except for c:\winnt and c:\Program Files. Also, configure it to back up document files from the entire hard drive (including c:\winnt and c:\Program Files.) If you think it's a problem, have people put their personal files (big Episode III trailers and the like) in a personal folder and don't back that up.
The backup would be run over the network at night. Make sure people keep their machines on. I assume your workplace is small and you should be able check the backup logs and see who turns their machines off and correct it. Some people are incorrigible, but you could put a Post-It over the power switch and offer a power strip that turns off everything else. Beyone offering all that help, you might still have a couple problem cases.
It almost doesn't matter where the data gets stored. A really decent sized tape array would probably be best. A bank of CD-RW drives and a robust labelling system would work okay. Backing up to a centralized hard drive would be okay too, especially if you could get something like a removeable drive bay and swap in new drives and take the old ones off-site. In fact, that last idea could be pretty ideal since drives keep coming down in price--a five-drive-rotation 100GB system might cost you around $1000. One of the things that I think sucks so bad is that you spend a heap of money on a good tape backup system only to have it be absurdly obsolete 5 years down the road--a "massive" tape array from 1995 held about 20GB and probably cost $10,000 or more. The removeable drive bay option seems kinda cool now that I think about it since it can be upgraded pretty cheap.
Now, if you can't get decent backup software ... or at least software that can do the remote stuff well, create a batch file that backs up the set of files described above to a network drive. Set it up with the AT service on NT to get it to run each night (good luck getting it to put files on the network, though.) Some careful planning in the batch file and you can get decent logging and such. Even crappy backup software should be able to run a backup of a network drive.
I'd actually recommend a batch-based "backup" system that works entirely locally. In my own world, 95%+ of the times I've had to restore a file it's because of some local condition: either I deleted something by accident, I saved something I shouldn't have, or it got corrupted by software--rather than loss through a fire or a hardware failure. I've got a batch file that runs each night and copies most of the day-to-day data I have to a "backup" subdirectory. I've used it a couple times to get stuff back and I'm very happy to have it.
Well, just some thoughts ...
--- Jason Olshefsky
Karma: Poser (mostly affected by adding this line long after everyone else did)
The environment I work in has about 20 users using win98se, XP, 2000, and NT 4.0.
/compact", 1, true
I setup a File Server and a Backup Server. I use a script to copy everything from the File Server to the Backup Server every night and then pkzip everything into a single large file on a nightly basis. The script generates a unique filename using the date. (eg: 6132002.zip).
I find this procedure the most versatile and convenient, as I only touch the backup server whenever the drive is close to filling up. I get an archive of all the daily changes made to every file. And I can quickly and conveniently access and manipulate all the files anytime (unlike Tape.) Of course if your company deals with large poorly compressible files (multimedia), this is not as effective. (BTW, pkzip has final zip size 2gig limit. I believe bzip has a 4 gig limit.)
Of course this is not a mission critical enterprise solution. (offline storage, offsite storage, etc.) But the raid and 2 separate servers gives me enough assurance for our small company's modest computing needs. (add a tape system if you'd like anyway)
The procedure:
Setup a File Server that everyone is mapped to upon logging in. (eg: N:\ drive)
Force all users to save everything to the mapped drive. Our company uses MS Outlook, so I have saved all the PST files to the file server as well.
Make sure the File Server is configured with 2 large drives in RAID 1 (mirrored. Software raid will be sufficient, otherwise get a $50 IDE RAID card). As this will be a production server, go with 7200 RPM drives. Size will not be an issue for most office environments saving word, excel, and access files.
Setup a Backup server. Any spare old computer will do with a 100MB NIC. Install 2 identical IDE HD's and run them in RAID1. 5400 RPM will be enough as the bottleneck will be the NIC and performance will not be an issue. The bigger the better. (eg: 120Gigs)
Write a script file. Mine is written using VBS. I use the command line version of pkzip in the script. I've attached it below as a reference.
In the future, I plan to replace our NT 4.0 file/backup servers with Redhat+Samba.
BTW, I've tried using Ghost, which is a great little program. However I don't find it as useful because of the diversity of hardware and licensing. So I end up with quite a few images for a small number of computers.
The script: (BTW, Copyall.bat is a dos batch file to copy all the files from the File Server to the Backup Server.)
'Backup.vbs
'Edwin Park 02-28-02
'CopyAll.bat will copy over files from File Server.
'Then Backup.Vbs will pkzip them locally using the date as the filename.
Option Explicit
Dim strDate
'pull out the "/" character because files cannot have "/" in them
strDate = Replace(Date(), "/", "-") 'strDate = 2202002
Dim WshShell
Set WshShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
WshShell.Run "CopyAll.bat >> copylog.txt", 1, true
WshShell.Run "pkzip25.exe -add -nofix -recurse -path=relative e:\backup\archive\" & strDate & " e:\backup\backupNight\*.* >> ziplog.txt", 1, true
'file "02202002.zip" is created
'Compact the database
WshShell.Run """c:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office\Msaccess.exe"" n:\DB_Shine_2000.mdb
Set WshShell = Nothing
Look, even if you are not a native-english speaker (which I am not either), try to make mistakes in the harder parts of the language instead of in the basic parts, ok?
Besides, I disagree: it is not your job that data is backed up....especially not the data that lives on workstations. The one that produces the data must be aware that his computer is not failsafe and that the network server is much better place to store important data....because it's the fileserver that you are looking after like it was your firstborn. Way back in the good old times, they only got a VT100 and there was no backup-of-workstation problem. Ah, how I regret those days....
This is a big problem on Windows due to the way the system is designed and due to the way applications work. I have been involved in this sort of thing for a while now; and while we've managed to mostly get things done correctly, it's not perfect.
Firstly, Windows does not really have the concept of a home directly. Certainly, there is the user's profile which gets synched to the server (assuming a domain account). But the problem is that the concept of a user *ONLY* having access to his or her own file - PERIOD - is non-existent.
Firstly, MANY applications require administrator provileges to even run correctly, EVEN THOUGH they don't *actually* need it to perform their task. This is absolutely brain-dead on the part of the software vendor; it's as if 'mutt' were to need write access to anything but ~ in order to work.
In the windows world, the need it becaues they want to store user data in the program folder on C, or under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE in the registry, or various other stupid reasons. This has the result that we are often FORCED to give users administror privileges just so they can run their broken applications! Even *THE* most popular bookkeeping program here in Sweden has problems of this kind. I cannot believe they get away with it.
The above negates the effect of fiddling with file permissions such that the user cannot write to C: except to c:\temp. So that's out. And even if it weren't, there are plenty of applications that insist on fiddling with certain files outside of the user's profile, even if they do not store any critical user data outside it.
On Unix it's simple. Backup ~ and you have *EVERYTHING*, period.
/ Peter Schuller
--
peter.schuller@infidyne.com
http://www.scode.org
I'm late posting as usual, don't know if anyone will ever even see this, but here goes. After skimming through the comments, it seems most veered way off the path of 'SMALL OFFICE'. All of these RAID solutions and ARC servers are obviously not what this poster is looking for. Very simple - On your server, make a folder called backups and share it so all the folks can get to it with read/write access. On each desktop, micrsoft has always included a little backup utility. Read the help, it's not too hard. Setup the backup on each desktop to select the data folder on their C: drive (the My Docs or Work or Data folder), and on the 'Backup to' option, select the Backup folder you made on the server. Don't worry about backing up the OS, if a system crashes, you're rebuilding anyway. It's the data you want. Save this, then copy/make a shortcut of this saved backup file to the desktop. All a user has to do is double click this saved profile to start the backup. (this was actually a lot easier in Windows 95, you may have to actually click the start button to begin the backup in 98) Show the users how to use it. It takes around 1 to 2 minutes to backup their data to the server this way. For the 1st couple of weeks you may have to remind them. Ask them, if they lost 1 days work, how long would it take them to re-create the day? This is answer can very widely depending on the tasks they do. Some ppl only put about an hours worth of data on their hard drives, other a full days worth. If the data is critical, tell the user to double click that shortcut everyday. Other, doing it once or twice a week may be fine. When I put on my coat at the end of the day, I would shout across the room 'You guys backup yet?' After a few reminders they'll get it. On the server, again read the help. Just set it up to do full backup daily (if a full of the server wont fit on one tape, concentrate on the data). Get 5 tapes and lable them Mon, Tues, etc. If it's Wednesday, put in Wednesday, etc. You can pop in a tape quarterly (QRT1, 2, 3, 4) if you want. Now you're backing up the backup. That's all. Remember, even if no server is present; the idea is to get the data off the hard drive and onto another location. 2 PCs, each with a shared drive. User A backups up to User B, etc. Can even be done with a simple copy/paste
To the idiot fool (by DysonSphere on Wednesday June 12, @03:22PM (#3688884)) who wrote this: "I actually did intentionally "crash" a box once. Our VP of Accounting refused to save data on our file server (netware at the time), even after we warned her repeatedly that she would lose data. One night another tech and I walked into her office, removed her hdd, and replaced it with a blank drive. Then next morning we came in early, and endured the fireworks, p1 ticket, and verbal diarrhea from the PHB (of course the "failure" was our fault....) After several hours (and a great game of Quake) we announced that we had (with great care and effort) recovered her data. We restored the data to her user dir, and re-installed all of her software on the new drive. Kudos all around, and no more problem. Mommy. What's a karma whore?" Apparently you are Dyson, a bad karma one at that This is right up there with setting a house on fire, so you can go put it out, then come out looking like a hero. Extremely unethical, and yeah, it's against the law. The fact that there were two of you schemeing this one is even scarier, each one convincing the other that it would be a perfectly acceptable thing to do. I hope she finds out and fires your ass. And I'll bet you wouldn't pull that crap if your 'VP' (which stands for Vice President, by the way, which makes her a very important and highly paid person, who if it wasn't for her you probably wouldn't have that sorry-ass job where you think you can bite the hand that feeds you anyway).....if your VP, was a man.
We use a device that appears to be no longer available, the HP Autobackup PC25/PC100 (for 25 or 100 clients, respectively). This says "powered by Previo" on it, and I looked on Previo's website (http://www.previo.com) and it appears that they have their own version of an autobackup device available: http://www.previo.com/home/products/appliance.asp. You load a piece of client software on everyone's machine, then load up the admin tool on the admin machine and set up everyone's computer backup strategy. I have ours set so that all the desktops are backed up at 7:00 PM Monday through Friday (we leave them on all the time), and laptops are backed up on a sliding schedule between 8:00 AM and noon Monday through Friday. The HP device takes a snapshot of each system and only puts files that have changed on the server. It also does not back up a file more than once if it is on multiple machines. We have had one machine lose a hard disk, and I had it up and running the next day (needing to ship the drive, it was actually up in about 2 hours) with no data loss. The HP devices have built-in HP Burners for making the disaster recovery CDs, but the Previo site says you can do it with a different machine that has a CD Burner in it. It is definitely worth looking into, because there is NO hassle on the admin once it's set up, and NO hassle on the end-users.
Jake Williams
Elcom, Inc.
http://www.elcomrep.com
So, you will probably have to buy hardware and software to automate backups if you want any real protection. Fortunately, the hardware for most backups is a comodity in that you can easily compare size/speed/reliability/cost stats to determine which is right for you. The backup software is a much more confusing decision because there are many products with features that make each backup product unique.
In selecting the software, it is probably best to start by looking at the products produced by the leading backup software vendor, VERITAS Software. Before you know what features you want, you need to see what features are available. Once you figure out which VERITAS product best fits your needs, you can look at competitors and compare features, support, and price. Here is how I think VERITAS markets its products:
That said, I actually just back up all my important data to another hard drive at home. It's risky, but at most I just lose email and pictures of my vacations. At work, though, it's NetBackup.
--NerdMachine
Okay, backing up our data is obviously important... and there are probably hundreds of different solutions out there. But which one is the most cost effective yet the most automated.
What I recommend is something straight forward. Something so simple that it is almost too good to be true. We set it up ourselves, and let me tell you, it is such an amazing process it isn't funny.
We had the same problem with our employees... everything is saved in their "My Documents" folder on their desktop. So what we did is this. We set up a specific server to host all the My Docs directories. We put massive storage in the server to make sure we don't run out of space. Then we went around to each desktop and changed the path to the My Docs directory pointing to our new server.
Now for the backup part:
We signed up with a remote back up company that has very flexible solutions. We basically push a secure transfer nightly to their remote servers. We pay our monthly fee, and have nothing to worry about. The company we chose does a lot of government work and a lot of work for MAJOR fortune 500 companies, and is bonded and secured (I don't think the Gov't would let some of their top secret info to be backed up by the company if it wasn't secure, know what I mean?).
If we ever need to retireve the data, no problem. If we need to change frequency to back up 4 times a day, or as little as once a week, no problem. They are SO flexible it isn't funny.
If you have any questions about our solution, let me know. I'd be more than glad to help you out on a one to one basis.
Simple yet smart, thats the way we went.
And the best part, it is so affordable. No more tapes in our organization!
My email addy is joe at savedonline dot com (no spaces, or underscores or anything. I hate Spam so I thought I'd put it like this to avoid it if possible).
CHEERS!
Joe Ussia
http://www.savedonline.com
Visit http://www.savedonline.com to check out out latest open source apps! We've got many coming out by end of 2002!
Thanks for the info. We are saying, however, that Veritas cannot be trusted, aren't we?
Veritas means truth. If you met a woman who said her name was Virgin, wouldn't you begin to think...?
banned still??
The capitalist system carried within itself the seeds of its own destruction. - Carl Marx
Dear Lux,
I am writing to you because there are clearly evil BOFHs on this site that in the old days told people to Format C:. Do not listen to their evil ways, or go to the dark side you will.
Any of these people who are suggesting purposely destroying data are lunatics, are highly unprofessional, and should be in violation of an IS code of ethics. First Do No Harm should be your motto.
That having been said, I would perform an amalgamation of what others have suggested-
*Create a base ghost image that is bootable on your site's PC models,
*Create application 'drives' and user drives, apps and shared data goes with the app, users have their own personal space,
*Get users converted to these shares and beat into their heads that if it's on the server it's forever, HDD data can be gone tomorrow,
*Get your backups set and tested waaay before the Big Day,
*Big Day -1, backup the workstations,
*Big Day, ghost the user's hard drive, recover any missing data to their network share,
*Big Day +1 on, all apps always go to the network drive, and reghost their workstations if any problems and take no crap if they foolishly left anything on the PC that was important to the business.
Of all the difficulties for your situation, the last one is most troublesome- the ghost image will clean out any problem and enforce the network drive rule, but many Windows apps absolutely require an install on C:. In this case you need a server deliverable workstation install- most packages should allow it.
________________________________________ History Must Not Fall Into The Wrong Hands ___________________________________
Typical NT Admin responses, "Lock it down!" "Don't let yor users get away with that crap!"
Why make more work for yourself?? Use iFolder for replication of local user data on your file server.
Standard editon supports NT, 2000 and NetWare. Professional edition adds support for Solaris and Linux.
Novell has something fairly new called iFolder which allows a selected folder to be backed up automatically to a central server running linux, Solaris, NetWare or Windblowz...
The data store is also available via a browser should it be needed.
Check it out at http://ifolderdemo.novell.com - get your bookmarks synchronised between PC's!
Depending on how much data involved, you can probably pick up a SNAP server for the network. It has software that will easily and automatically backup data that you specify on user's workstations.
Just get the users to share the folders, password protect them if neccessary, create links to them in a folder on a win2000 machine (windows - yuk) and back them up yourself with MS backup or something :-)
-= Never enter a battle of wits with an unarmed man =-
Get 'em each a CD burner, a pack of RW CDs, and offer 5 sessions to teach them how to use it. Publicize it beyond your branch, and write an SOP that is 1) approved by your corporate IT dept, 2) shared during the education sessions, and 3) sent to all users.
It sounds like a no-win situation as you'll likely be blamed whenever a shiftless user losers his/her data. Doing the above means that the sh#$ will rain on whoever is running the clown college.