When Does Data Backup Become a Full Time Job?

nasteric asks: "Myself and 5 co-workers assume a number of responsibilities at my current job, including monitoring our tape backup jobs that run nightly. We do a good job of keeping non work related items (mp3's, wav files, etc.) off our servers, but our users keep eating up disk space very quickly. File storage, along with the fact that we have numerous projects 'going live' that each require one or more servers means more investment in our backup solutions. Fortunately, we have the capital to expand our backup solution (media, drives, autoloaders, software, etc.) but my boss cringes when I suggest hiring a full-time person to handle the backups. Ensuring the integrity of our nightly backups is critical, but my teammates are being spread thin due to the rapid expansion of our company. We really feel the best solution would be dedicated backup person. We currently backup approximately 3.5 terabytes of data and our enterprise expands to over 4 states. Does anybody have any suggestions as to when data backup becomes a full-time position? Are there any resources that specify when a full-time person dedicated to data backup should be hired? It would be nice to have some resources to refer to when proving my point to my boss."

Comments

Obvious?

[Perdo]

When the cost of losing data exeeds the salery that would be paid to a dedicated IT guy

-or-

Backup will be taken seriously right after you loose a good chunk of data.

Then your boss will hire two people. One to do backups and one to replace the guy that cheesed the last one.

Cost analysis

[TheSHAD0W]

Is the total time spent by people in your department on backup operations approaching 40 hours per week? If your department needs more manpower anyway, and the bosses are considering hiring another person, then yes, you might as well dedicate this guy to backup solutions. Specialization is more cost effective than interrupting other jobs to do the work.