Your question is a very valid one and especially in light of the most recent blog posting by President Roth, it is very relevant.

We in ITS have taken this question up a few times and because of the complicated nature of the TSM system, we have not been able to do much. For example, moving the backup time to an earlier time is definitely an option. We can schedule the desktop backups at 9 AM, anticipating that most of the desktop backups will finish by 5 PM. However, when the backup kicks-off, the entire hard disk(s) are scanned to determine if any file has changed. This slows the system so much that if you are working on the machine, it will be very annoying.

The other option is to avoid scheduling them, but rely on the user to initiate the backup manually on a regular basis. We do not think this will work - the backups will be irregular and in many cases, the users will forget to do it.

We have also explored a technology called Wake on LAN - what this simply means is that your computer will receive a signal to turn itself on when we are ready to back it up and then will be turned off at the end of the backup. We looked at this a few years ago and decided not to pursue this on various counts - not all computers had this capability, the technology itself was not mature enough and reliable, and most importantly the TSM client and server actually negotiate several times before the actual backup is made. This means, in a span of 6 hours or so, the computer may have to be woken up and shutdown 2 or 3 times and the points of failures therefore increase.

In a recent inquiry to find out what the other colleges and universities are doing, I received an interesting study by Gustavus Adolphus College - https://gustavus.edu/gts/Power_usage_of_various_devices. Basically they measured the energy consumption by computers. Briefly, what they found can be summarized:

* Computing devices use energy even when they are turned off.
* The differential energy consumption between a computer that is in power save mode and completely turned off is minimal.
* A Mac G4 tower used about 120W while on and idling while a dual core P4 only used 85W.

In addition, newer hardware and operating systems are beginning to pay a lot of attention to energy conservation.

One of our staff member is engaged in studying power consumption by the computers on campus and develop some recommendations. We are also pursuing becoming a beta site for Microsoft’s Green Campus initiative through which we will have immediate access to best practices in lowering energy consumption.

We will certainly re-open this topic in ITS and I will write back on our plans.

One comment that I have about the overnight backup is energy use. This schedule required computers to be left on during the night that means that there are a lot of computers left on, using a lot of energy that are not being used. Perhaps ITS should look into a different schedule to save energy and lower operational costs.