[labnetwork] Tool PC backups / PC redundancy

[Nathan Nelson - Fitzpatrick]

Hi Labnetwork,

Over the past year our lab has seen quite a few new tool installations and as a result we now have over thirty tools (microscopes, EBL, deposition/etch systems, etc…) that have some sort of interface with a personal computer.  Many of these personal computers are run-of-the-mill consumer grade PCs and I think that running this many computers over a many-year timescale will mean that failures are virtually guaranteed.  I’m very interested in knowing how larger labs with many computers (with many different port configurations, hardware requirements, and operating systems) prepare for and deal with this problem.

At our site, we are simply cloning the various tool hard drives (using Clonezilla) onto external hard drives that sit on a shelf in my office.  This is time consuming and requires some discipline to keep going.  The other problem with this approach is that it does not really protect us in the case of non-disk hardware failures (such as a motherboard failure).  I’d love to know the philosophies and approaches that larger labs employ to deal with this problem.

Thanks,
  -Nathan
--
Nathan Nelson-Fitzpatrick  PhD
Nanofabrication Process Engineer
Quantum NanoFab
University of Waterloo
200 University Avenue West
Waterloo, ON   Canada  N2L 3G1
Ph: +1 519-888-4567 ext. 31796




-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mtl.mit.edu/pipermail/labnetwork/attachments/20141112/eff6760c/attachment.html>