Backup Admin Role Question

[SoupRice]

I am an analyst for a medium size company with about 20 NT/Win servers within the backup. In addition to all related backup tasks I also do general help support and office tasks. I am trying to find out how the "backup admin" role is handled in other companies, thus my quesions:
In your company...

-Who is the person/people tasked with the "backup admin" roll? (network admin, network tech/andlyst, data center)

-Is it a specific job role or just something this person does in addition to othere tasks?

-Does this person only do the install/patching of the software or manage the jobs and tape swapping also?

-How much time, on average, is spent each week on the backup tasks (monitoring jobs, changing tapes, patching)?

Other coments on how this role is handled?

 

[blakey2]

Hey SoupRice,

This probably does not help much as I am a 'one man show' in charge of about 60 users in a mixed winNT win 2k and win 2k3 environment.

I do all the backups as well as everything else.

We backup 150GB nightly - That is full backup on Tuesday (3 tapes) and differential backups mon, wed, thurs & fri.
Nightly using ArcServe 10??

Exchange server is backed up seperately on diff tape device, nightly full backup. It is about 14GB in size.
Using ArcServ 6.61 with exch agent.

Hope this helps - Chris.

 

[jonb2]

Hi,

I'd guess that it would be a System Administrator who would look after the backup operations and this should probably be added to someone's job responsibilities rather than having a dedicated job for backups. However, as you might be aware this is a very imported role.

I look after all that you've mentioned and quite frankly I do not spend a great deal of time on this. I have already setup the backups so no time is needed on these. I do a full backup on Monday to Thursday (nights) on a set of weekly tapes, a full backup on friday on a set of 4 tapes used as my week ending and then a 12 month ending tapes.

I use Veritas Backup Exec 9.0 with it installed on my PC aswell. Every morning I open this up and all backups are listed with any failures. On average I spend around 15 - 30 miuntes a day(maximum) on backup operations (checking, loading tapes, etc). You may need to take into account that any problems you cross will add time onto this. However if you have a good strategy and it's all setup correctly then you shouldn't have to spend time on fixing problems. The main problems that occur for me are running out of diskspace on a tape or a tape drive failure. These are reasonably easily problems to correct because I have a spare DL tape drive and spare tapes so these can be changed quickly if needed.

One more thing to think about is the time you need to spend on running through your disaster recovery plans. I run through mine on a spare server at least every 6 months. I do my disaster recovery tests on a server that has nothing on (no operating system, etc). This can be quite time consuming as you need to load the O/S, drivers, programs, etc, so put a side at least 1/2 a day if not a day to run through it - and then write the procedure down for future use - you never know when you might need it.

If you want anymore info letme know.

Cheers

JonB (UK)

 

[Vela]

It depend's how much data you are to back up. I back up roughly 9-11TB per day 24/7 365

 

[comtec17]

This is going to depend on your environment, type of backup software, how much data, and automation implementation.

Typically the Systems Admin is responsible for most backup operations including swapping tapes.

In larger environments, the administrators are responsible for the system and jobs but a NOC monitors and swaps out tapes.