[geeks] DST hell

[Dan Duncan]

On 3/11/07, Eric Railine <erailine at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I was working at a company that used Lotus Notes for email and Legato
> > for backups and
> > they were in the process of transitioning their data center to the
> > parent company which used Tivoli for backups.  We were in a meeting
> > with them while they described their backup
> > process for the mail server.  They backed up the mail database files
> > as files, rather than using the module for Tivoli.  I asked if this
> > worked for them.  "Well, it works pretty good except for 1 or 2 times
> > out of 10."   So, basically, a 10-20% failure rate was apparently ok.
>
> They must have been doing something very wrong, or had bad equipment
> for their backups.  I ran Legato backups for Lotus Notes servers for
> years and did many, many restores of various databases - whether
> mailboxes or otherwise, and I don't recall ever having a problem with
> restoring one of those databases or using the database after the
> restore.  Legato is a good product IMO.

They were using Tivoli and backing up the mailboxes as files.  If the
mailbox was
accessed during the backup (incoming mail or their desktop was still logged in
and touched the mailbox in any way) then the backup of that mailbox
for that night
was worthless.  We were using Legato but we had the module for Lotus Notes that
backed up the mailbox as a database.  For some reason I don't recall
the version of
Notes, Legato, and the module itself didn't allow incremental backups
of the mailbox
files, only full backups.  Since both Notes and Tivoli were IBM
products, I'd be amazed
if there wasn't a similar backup module.  It might even have been free
after paying for both Notes and Tivoli, but I guess a 10-20% failure
rate was ok to them.
-- 
Dan Duncan