We are in the process of putting ADSM into production. Our LAN server person
wants to use it to backup his servers for disaster recovery purposes.  One
of his concerns is the idea of "old" files.  That is, he can envision
backing up a server to ADSM using an incremental backup.  However, many of
his critical files, ie. OS/2 and applications probably won't change very
often.  He is concerned that these files will be backed up once and then
never be touched again.  If something should happen to one or more of them,
he wouldn't know until he needed to do a restore.  He would like to be
able to force ADSM to backup all the files periodically, similar to the
full pack dumps we do on the mainframe.

I see that we have the option in ADSM of defining a copy group to do
either incremental backups, or absolute, not both.  One way to solve the
problem would be to manually change the copy group definition on a periodic
basis.  However, I would rather have a more automated way to handle it.
Another way would be to have two different copy groups, one for incremental
dumps and one for absolute.  Then have two different DSM.OPT files that would
control which server files were backed up with which group.  Finally, I
have thought about simply deleting the filespace, which ought to force a
full dump of the server.

Does anyone have any other suggestions?  How have you handled this issue, or
has it never come up?

Martha