Thanks

Since disk space is so inexpensive today, I personally recommended a third party program called undelete found at: http://www.executive.com/undelete. Although tape backups can’t be eliminated, the number of times you actually have to use it for restore is greatly reduced, and to me, a real time saver. Like auditing, tape restore is a royal pain from my perspective. Perhaps the upper end of tape backup software such as netbackup would make the restore process easier, but most of my working relationships don’t have an IT budget to justify this type of expense.

Undelete is really a great tool for any organization, with little overhead other than disk space. The more you can allocate for it, the less often you need to actually do the restore. They claim it’s cluster aware, however, I’ve had lots of trouble making it work correctly in a cluster. The best part, and the reason I’m actually sending a reply is the Undelete bin will tell you the user who deleted it, and when it was deleted. Although you could just install and go, I would recommend serious configuration for files you don’t want to end up in the undelete bin. Also, for speed, I would suggest an undelete bin for each drive so the files don’t have to be moved to another set of disks. It’s really very inexpensive for a file server, and as someone pointed out, files deleted across the network do not get put in the normal undelete bin, however, undelete does capture files deleted across the network wire. From my perspective, it’s a needed tool for any network, as everyone knows files get deleted all the time, and I hate spending time in the backup software. One more note about security. All files can end up in the undelete bin. This could include sensitive material. I know of an instance where an IT guy would pass random drug screening as he would know when they were scheduled, and for who. The IT guy did not have access to the data storage location, but did have access to the undelete bin. As word documents are modified, they get deleted which puts them in the undelete bin, so you do have to be careful with who you let use it. This is just one example, but I’m sure you can relate this to other situations such as Bonus reviews, salary’s and other sensitive information.

While your there (off topic) I also suggest another valuable tool called “Diskeeper”. Again, very inexpensive (unless you want the exchange version), and runs circles around other defragmentation programs.

I hope this helps.
Robert Sexton