My manager spent $1M on a backup server that I never used
This rant starts of pretty badly, with &quot;Windows bad, Unix good, Windows especially bad because it doesn&#x27;t have Unix tools&quot;.<p>Reverse that statement. Is Unix bad because it doesn&#x27;t Windows tools?<p>&gt; but simultaneously there was nothing to lean back on: no shell, no Unix tools like sed&#x2F;awk, no SSH. I<p>He joined in 2014, when Windows had a <i>superior</i> shell and remoting system that eliminates the requirement for low-level string parsing tools like sed&#x2F;awk entirely!<p>PowerShell + WinRM + Desired State Configuration (DSC) was all pretty mature at the time, and I had used these technologies to manage huge fleets of servers solo without issues.<p>Then, almost none of this heroic database backup efforts would have been required if they had just a commercial database product, e.g.: one designed for Windows such as SQL Server.<p>In 2014 it supported AlwaysOn Availability groups that allowed multiple synchronous and asynchronous replicas! It also has had true online backups since before 1997.<p>His second mistake is that backups can be incremental, but a restore in a (true) disaster is a full restore by definition! Differential + Log backups are great to capture data regularly during the day, but the business requirement is usually that a full restore must complete in a reasonable time.<p>Typical commercial databases plus the product he mentioned could easily backup and restore tens of terabytes in setups I&#x27;ve seen directly to or from any proper database engine without having to through &quot;NFS&quot; on the way. Typically you&#x27;d use a native backup agent.<p>This whole article sounds like a self-important Unix engineer refusing to touch commercial products, lack of understanding of business requirements, and an allergy to Windows.