I am very glad to see this discussion of backing up ADSM, as I have
been struggling with this myself.

Our goal is to be able to recover from a disaster that would destroy
the building that contains the ADSM server.  We are willing to treat
the clients that are not in this building as themselves being "offsite"
backups of their ADSM data, except for their archive data.  All archive
data, all current data for clients in this building, and all server
information required to get the server going again must be backed up
and moved offsite on a regular basis.

Does anybody see any holes in this plan:

1.  On Monday through Friday mornings, do a DUMP DB; move those tapes
    offsite during the day.

2.  On Monday through Friday mornings, do an EXPORT NODE FILEDATA=
    ARCHIVE for all nodes; move those tapes offsite during the day.

3.  On Saturday/Sunday do an EXPORT NODE FILEDATA=BACKUP for all nodes
    in the domain defined for nodes in this building; move those tapes
    offsite on Monday.

The hope then would be that restoring all those tapes would get us to
the point where all clients would be registered, but the ones not in
this building would all need to do full incremental backups the first
time they connected to the server.

One question I have is whether there is any advantage to doing an
EXPORT SERVER rather than an EXPORT NODE for the daily backup of the
archive data?

I was also somewhat surprised by Greg's suggestion 2:

> 2. use existing backup utilities to backup online storage pool
> volumes and tape copy tape stg pool volumes.  This works fine for
> the disk volumes but is extremely cumbersome for the tape volumes.
> Mgt of the copies and recovery will be challenging.

I had been assuming that simply copying the storage pool tapes and
disks would produce an inconsistent enough copy of the data that it
would not be of much use.  Is there any point in, for example, making
DDR copies of the storage pool disks while the server is running?

I was also interested in Greg's comment that export runs extremely
slowly for large amounts of server data.  We currently have 225 clients
and 8,340,000 database entries.  We are expecting those numbers to grow
a lot (probably ten-fold).  Would I be wiser to break the load up into
separate ADSM servers, e.g., one for clients in this building and one
for others?  (Many of the largest clients are here.)

Melinda Varian,
Princeton University