whee

[synthe.livejournal.com]

Today I got in the mood to clean, so I decided to do an inventory of our backup tapes and develop a retention and scratch policy. Informally Sharon has been scratching old weekly incrementals, and the occasional old weekly full backups, and someone at some point got rid of all tapes before July. I came up with the following:
Keep all tapes for the month
Keep all full backups for the 2 months before that
Keep the last full backup of the month before those

That let us scratch 32 tapes, leaving only 18 to store. At $50ea new, I just saved the company $1600, because Sharon was going to buy new tapes since we were running out. In theory, if we keep this scratch policy up (doing it every month) we shouldn't have to buy new tapes for at least a couple years, though we might before then just because we'll be reusing the tapes over and over.

I feel good. Maybe tomorrow I'll tackle the storeroom, with all of the ancient software, computers, etc in it. I get the impression that old equipment might be salvagable by us for home use. I'll bring it up with Sharon if I do it.