Greg Stigers continues to 'wine':

> You know, that's really not the part of the email I hoped to see
> responses to.

Okay, in the interest of stopping all further whines and groans, I'll
share my experience with backups and off-site (hyphen-aided) storage.

Our corporate policy dictates essentially what Greg quoted as HP's
recommendation. In practice, however, we have interpreted "a copy of the
backup must be stored off-site" to mean that the *one* "copy" that we have
is stored off-site. This satisfies the off-site requirement, and since
there is no corporate requirement to store tapes *on*-site, there's really
no justification for doing so. At least, none worth losing your data for.

That doesn't mean we don't bring tapes back on-site for restores; we do.
But we're not allowed to keep them on-site overnight. (Presumably the
night air is bad for the tapes if they're not safely in bed at the storage
facility. :-) Our storage company makes two daily runs to pick up tapes
from us, and if we need one or more brought back we -- after filling out
the requisite paperwork, of course -- just have them bring what we need
when they make their next run.

Concerning X-OVER (which Barry <plug>ed), we bought it and love it. We
don't use it to make copies of our regular backups, but it *has* allowed
us to reduce our off-site storage costs considerably: we have many old
quarterly and yearly backups which are labeled as "keep forever" or "keep
10 years." Most of these are full system backups which originally used
over 30 reels of 2400 ft mag tape. We have successfully X-OVER'd several
of these backups from 30+ reels to 1 DLT, verified them with VSTORE,
restored and tested several of them on our crash'n'burn box. We'll
eventually convert all of them. What can I say but it works as advertised.
(Disclaimer: not selling X-OVER, just a very happy customer. YMMV.)

Patrick
--
Patrick Santucci
Technical Services Analyst
Seabury & Smith, Inc.