Excuse me? Yes, most systems back up everything. I run an ISP. We back up -everything- (well not netnews), nightly.
Hmm. Any why *don't* you back up netnews? For more or less the same reasons it's not particularly useful to back up outgoing mail spools; to claim that "most systems do blah blah" is like saying that "most people like menudo." I, for one, don't. "{I/we} run an ISP" is a ubiquitous statement these days; everybody and his brother "runs an ISP." I know a drunken college dropout down the block with a limping sun 3/50 and two phone lines who prides himself on his ISP. What is not so common is common sense regarding privacy, ie there is not any real reason to back up an *outgoing* mail spool unless you want security_agency_of_ your_choice to come and root through your exabyte tapes next week. Now, as I mentioned in a followup, incoming mail is a different matter. At some point it loses its meaning, though: mail is mail, and it's all incoming somewhere. The only useful alternative is strong encryption of *all* messages, an alternative which solves both the nosy-sysadmin problem as well as styming the snooping legal beagles. ~james