In What Is A Backup?, I compared conventional backups to local snapshots, concluding that restoring data faster using backups is easier when you know where it was last. With conventional backups, an administrator, after cursing under his breath and wishing he could just say no to the CFO, could search the catalog database for *smith*.xls in Finance and locate the file. Since local snapshots don’t include catalogs, it’s harder to restore the data that disappeared sometime last summer. But there are more issues around using local snapshots for backup.
Network Computing