The Backup Thread -- RAID is not backup!

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Backup Thread -- RAID is not backup!

JBark: Jun 27, 2000; Good passwords are a good idea.

Most backup programs have an option to run a command before starting ajob. Could just have it run taskkill /im outlook.exe before starting.

At the simplest, a batch file that runs the taskkill and then a robocopy of the PST is a better backup process than about 99% of the home business types I've dealt with. To spice things up, you could use a simple VBS file with this to gracefully close Outlook first:

code:

strComputer = "."
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:" _
& "{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2")
Set colProcessList = objWMIService.ExecQuery _
("Select * from Win32_Process Where Name = 'Outlook.exe'")
For Each objProcess in colProcessList
   Set objOutlook = CreateObject("Outlook.Application")
   objOutlook.Quit
Next

csript outlookclose.vbs in a scheduled task that runs with the user's credentials should do it.

Edit:
Found a better script that checks to see if Outlook is running first.

JBark fucked around with this message at 05:51 on Oct 9, 2015

# ¿ Oct 9, 2015 05:49

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 18:19

JBark: Jun 27, 2000; Good passwords are a good idea.

Email I got while I was on holiday:

"I need some email archives from some ex-employees from about 15-20 years ago. Could you get me some PSTs when you're back on Monday?"

The backups from before my time consist of an archive box full of CD/DVDs, about 50 DDS-2 tapes (I have no drive for these), and 200-300 DLT and SDLT tapes (which I do have drives for). Very few of the tapes are labelled, a few with dates and some with a server name, and I'm not even sure what was used to create the backups. I do know that the more recent DLT/SDLT backups were done using Retrospect, which is probably the worst application ever created.

Hilariously enough, I found a 12 year old CD with a 100 part RAR file that contained a 1GB PST file for a person I was looking for. Not a single error extracting the rars, and pst is still good and has email going back to the mid 90s. I certainly didn't expect the CD to still be in perfect condition, and even some CDs I found going back to 98 or so were all perfect.

Once the ancient Adaptec 29160 I ordered off eBay gets here so I can actually connect the old DLT drives, it's back to the horror of ancient tapes and terrible backup apps. Even better, my predecessor tried to restore some data from tapes about 8 years ago, and every single tape was useless. From what I gather in his old emails, the tapes were likely written with garbage data from the beginning, and nobody had ever attempted a single restore so they had no idea until they went to restore years later. Data recovery company found nothing of use on the tapes, even the tape headers were junk.

Yep, it's pretty much the stuff a backup engineer's nightmares are made from.

# ¿ Oct 27, 2015 07:53

JBark: Jun 27, 2000; Good passwords are a good idea.

ConfusedUs posted:

Wow that's a hell of a lucky story.

Also, man, 15-20 years ago is a HELL of a long time. Is there a reason you keep backups from that long ago?

Mainly the previous IT guys were insane packrats, and whenever I tried to get rid of anything after I took over, I always got "well, we might need it someday" from the higher-ups. There is patent stuff involved, so I suppose I really can't fault them for keeping stuff from around the original filing date, but it sure it would have been nice to just have a simple set of EOFY tapes or a Patent XXXX backup archive or something like that. Instead, I've got a dozen metal briefcases stuffed completely full of poorly labelled tapes.

Unrelated to my backup stuff, and in regards to free backups, there's also the Unitrends free edition. It's not all that useful if you're wanting application aware backups of say Exchange or SQL, but just file level backups should be fine. It supports VMs, and it's default setup is to backup to local storage, and then you configure archives to tape. I gave it a test here recently at a remote site, and it did the job, but nothing amazing. If you use the Spiceworks promo code SPICYUEB when registering the free edition, it does let you do a couple application aware backups too. In the end, I found the backup speed was so poor because the fixed compression they use during the backup is only single threaded and was maxing out the single core it was using. So I was only getting like 30MB/sec. writing to a local RAID10. You can supposedly disable this compression in the advanced settings and get a pretty enormous boost in speed, but I didn't have enough local storage to hold all the backups with compression completely off.

In the end it was just too much hassle to work around all the quirks, and since I was backing up to a couple USB drives I was able to get away with some wbadmin scheduled tasks. But in the case of a simple backup of some files to local storage, then archive to tape, it might do the trick.

JBark fucked around with this message at 06:47 on Oct 28, 2015

# ¿ Oct 28, 2015 06:38

JBark: Jun 27, 2000; Good passwords are a good idea.

ConfusedUs posted:

This is great, until there's a lawsuit, and you get a subpoena for all of your emails, and now the lawyers have 20 years of stuff to search for ammo.

Think of it this way: have you, at any time in the last 20 years, written even one email whose contents you wouldn't want to show up in a court of law? What about your loud-mouthed buddy in the cube next door? Or that boorish sales guy across the hall? Or the CEO who can't help but refer to "those people"?

Believe me, you're preaching to the choir. I've given this same reasoning, but to deaf ears. The real solution would be to go through all the old poo poo once and actually archive what might be relevant, then get rid of everything. But who wants to be the poor sap that has to spend weeks/months wading through ancient email archives? Not me, that's for sure.

# ¿ Oct 28, 2015 09:45

JBark: Jun 27, 2000; Good passwords are a good idea.

It took me a few weeks, but I finally figured out what was used to create my 15+ year old tapes...

G3 Power Mac, MacOS 9.2.2, Retrospect 5.1. That's right, this is basically peak backup nightmare. Note that this office is, and has always been, 100% Windows PCs and servers. Apparently the guy who handled the IT stuff way back then was a huge Apple fan, so he bought a Mac to do all the backups. I can't even begin to count the number of iterations of SCSI cards, OS X versions, VMware versions, Power Macs, etc... I went through to finally work my way back to something that did the trick.

In the end, a guy in the office remembered he had an old G3 Mac in his shed that he bought from the office years ago for $5 when they were clearing out old equipment. He brought it in, and I'm pretty sure I'm actually using the exact Mac that originally did the backups all those years ago.

Oh well, I've never actually used OS9 before, so it's an interesting visit to retro land.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2015 01:47

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