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Comment by susi22 | Hacker News Reader

In a corporate environment I'd expect crucial data to be on the network drive and snapshotted every few hours. We run ZFS on our network and all the secretaries have to do their doc/excel work on the drive. Nowadays that everybody has a Gigabit Ethernet connection read/writes are extremely quick.

Use ZFS and make read only snapshots that are only accessible to the sysadmins. You'll solve many problems that way. We do snapshots at 6am,noon and 6pm and then keep the 6pm one for 7, 14 and 30 days.

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In about any corporation you look, crucial data will be in a Windows server (no ZFS available, sorry), and backed up on intervals that are some integer multiple of 24 hours.

Or, better, the above is the best case scenario that IT dreams of achieving some day. In practice, a huge share of the crucial data sits on people's machine, with no backups, and go on vacation every year.

Most corporate windows file servers (since 2003) use shadow copy, which saves previous versions of files every couple of hours. Any decent IT dept will use folder redirection, which redirects deskop, my documents to the local file server.

Agreed. At a previous job, I set up a multi-terabyte SMB/NFS file server (Solaris, ZFS) with snapshots taken every 5 minutes. This was incredibly useful. The snapshots (in .zfs directories) were even accessible to end-users so that they could recover from their own mistakes without the help of sysadmins.

With such a setup, the only situation in which sysadmins are required are when end-users accidentally copy sensitive data to the file server, remove it, and need sysadmins to also remove the snapshots to permanently remove the sensitive data.

Yup. That's been the standard practice for the past 10 years, to avoid having to request media from an offsite vendor. Used to use VSS on SANs.

(Tested backups are the first three rules of IT.)

> Use ZFS and make read only snapshots

IIRC ZFS snapshots are read-only by definition. Clones are the writable ones.

This is a great solution if you have a good technical staff helping to run a business. The reality is though that this is more likely to affect businesses without technical knowledge, or home users.

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