Raven and Peter Håkanson,

Thank you for your responses.

> Can I ask if he has a valid point or is it just a case of penny pinching?
> How much value do you place on the tapes if you actually need to use them
> for a restore?

I never thought I'd regret I am not in corporate world. :) Here is a
bigger picture: we are a research institution. We *are* on a tight
budget, and doing monthly fulls for the available disk space without
recycling tapes would run into six figures (USD). Backups are
important mostly for disaster recovery and short-term data loss - I
have had virtually no requests for files over half a year old.
However, we have had cases in the past when years-old data had to be
dug up regarding some patent issues. On top of all, our attempts to
ask the backup policy on a higher level have not had any reply yet - I
guess nobody wants to be responsible for formulating it. (Looks like
this is the first thing to pursue - there are still even higher people
to consult.)

> Could it be time to reconsider your whole strategy including the choice of
> backup software?

I am not averse to the idea - one of the reasons for the post is to
find out what other people are doing in similar situations.

> How many tape units and locations? By the sounds of it you need to run
> separate jobs for each machine so as to keep groups of tapes for each.

Two locations, two tape units in each, for Windows and Unix servers
separately.
Close to a hundred servers in total with about 10 Tb of disks storage
(and growing), though, thankfully, it's only about 50% utilized so
far.

The problem with separate jobs is increased maintenance time. After
all, we are not only minimizing the tape cost, but the man-hours
spent, which can be more productively used elsewhere.

> Agreed and agreed. Perhaps it's worth re-evaluating whether the cost of
> tapes under the current system is really that excessive.

From what I understand, the budgets are *really* tight. :)

> How many tapes are we talking about in total? Surely the value of the tape
> is irrelevant if the backups are so critical to the operation?

Judging by the frequency of the requests, long-term backups are not
very critical, but as I mentioned, in the absence of the policy you
never know.

> As far as accountability, if they really are tracking the tape costs
> themselves simply serial number each tape and do a semi-regular audit. Tapes
> that go bad get officially written off, tapes that go missing get
> questioned.

I did not mean just keeping track of tapes themselves, but rather of
what exactly is on each tape. And with centralized backup software,
it's non-trivial.

Simon Ilyushchenko