There are now over 1000 Unix Workstations on the CERN site and the number grows almost daily. Some of these are grouped into well-organised clusters where system administration tasks are well understood and handled by assigned individuals. Others are less well catered for and many end-users now find themselves having to become part-time system administrators and having to care about such things as user account creation, network configuration and file backups.
The UNIX Workstation Support Section in CN's DCI Group provides advice and help in several of these areas, including specially-written Guides for most of the supported workstations at CERN. (See the latest edition of your favourite CERN computing newsletter for full details of these services or go to the UCO for a copy of the Guide most interesting for you.)
This section describes a suggested file backup policy covering systems at CERN. We emphasise (a) the following is only a suggestion -- if you already have file backup under control or prefer a different scheme, we will in no way try to change your methods; (b) we have not surveyed the whole market, it is too broad; these tools may or may not be the best, we have assured ourselves that they work correctly and do the job required.
The bases of our policy are: to encourage clustering where possible, to select tools with some reasonable user interface, to select tools which use network resources as efficiently as possible, and to select tools which either support multiple platforms already or are expected to do so in a future release.