root@bu-cs.UUCP (Barry Shein) (04/01/85)
Date: 4/1 To: Boston University User Community Subject:UUCP delay lines Tape backups are rather tedious and expensive. In an attempt to reduce these costs I have recommended the following to our users: Certain slow UUCP paths around the net have been identified. These paths are known to take a few days to cycle between here (bu-cs) there and back again. These paths have been identified and are in a public file (/usr/pub/uumollasses) on our system. A shell script has been put on our system which will send a file or group of files out over this slow path headed back towards the originator. Use 'uuBCK [files or directories]'. The result is that you will always receive your critical files a few days later in the mail which can be recovered after a disaster. The beauty of this plan is that even if we are hopelessly down, the next node in the hop will spool and patiently wait for us. Being as this storage is off-site (often, off-city) this can be considered a very secure backup method. For users with even higher security needs different paths can be chosen and redundant copies sent. Even in the event of impending war international paths can be chosen through countries with low probability of conflagration. The only problem I see is that we have about 15,000 users and >30GigaBytes of disk storage but that seems to me to be the problem of remote sites. With the savings in both personnel and tapes I expect we will finally be able to purchase all those neat things you people have been hearing about on the net by Q1. -Barry "Always thinkin of No. 1" Shein, Boston University