Over the past decade, the pervasiveness of the Internet has resulted in an astounding growth of digital content. This growth is not about to slow down anytime soon. Thus, back-up and recovery of this digital content is becoming increasingly important. However, as with learning other technologies, back-up and recovery applications involve a “teething period,” for both system administrators and end users.

This paper highlights the pain points involved in setting-up and maintaining data-backup and recovery applications. The paper begins by providing an introduction to Baylor University. It then goes on to describe the information technology (IT) infrastructure setup, and the needs of a typical user at the university. This provides a useful landscape to understanding the need for a back-up application.

The paper goes on to describe the process (in 12 steps) of setting-up and fine-tuning Tivoli as a back-up application at the university. These steps provide a useful list of the pitfalls that the authors faced while deploying a back-up application, which can be useful to other system administrators looking to set up similar applications. However, the paper would have been more useful if the authors had described: the evaluation process used before Tivoli was picked as a back-up application; the details of the type of back-up (for example, incremental versus full) used, and why; and, their experience when recovering backed-up data.

As digital content continues to grow, back-up and recovery applications will continue to grow in importance. The paper provides a good starting point for system administrators who wish to deploy back-up and recovery applications at their data centers.