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
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.
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
Linus once said "Real men don't use backups. They upload everything to an FTP site and everyone mirrors them." (According to Lars...)
Seriously, SMBtar is a wonderful tool, just require them to share out important directories. You can do the same thing using a simple shell script. That is what I have done in the past. This can then be stored on tape, hdd on a major server, etc.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I've had to do it to a user before. They flat out refused to save anything to the server. After that, everything they did was on the server.
sPh
Make sure something important was there, that wasn't properly placed onto the fileserver.
... so make it a controlled explosion that just singes the user a little, rather than scattering body parts over a couple of city blocks. (ok, maybe in today's world the explosion metaphore wasn't the best one to use...)
That's not testing a disaster recovery plan, that's deliberately destroying user data so you can say "See, I'm right, neener."
Well, not if he just unplugs the drive and puts a scare into the user. Let 'em sweat for a couple of hours, then manage to fix the problem and let them know how incredibly lucky they are the power cord just worked its way loose and it wasn't a real hard drive crash that would have wiped out their data, something that is a lot more common.
It'll drive the point home in a non-destructive manner, which may be the best thing one can do. It is human nature not to learn such lessons until they blow up in your face
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
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
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".
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.