At one site I worked at we used a vendor supplied version of Legato. We used
this with the Oracle database extensions to backup a (then) 100 GB oracle
database.

After a particularly nasty disk crash, we had to restore the database. At
this point we found the the Oracle extensions told us that it had backed up
certain tablespaces which had explicitly been named to the backup system,
but in fact the tablespaces were not on the tapes. After scanning all the
tapes backwards in time, we eventually found a copy. However, restoring it
put the database in to a corrupted mode, and a lot of fun was then had
trying (unsuccessfully) to get the tablespace back.

Eventually we gave up (after 4 weeks of work) and declared the data to have
been lost.

The site no longer uses this implementation of Legato.

After much complaining to the OEM supplier, they gave us the fix. This was a
single printed sheet which ammended the documentation to tell us that the
"feature" we were using (based on the OEM vendors consultants
recommendations) was not supported and would corrupt our database! Out
delight at the vendor should no bounds at this point.

Moral: If you are planning to use Legato, get it directly from Legato
themselves and be wary of OEM supplied versions.

The site and the vendor are deliberately being kept quiet to protect the
guilty (and by chance of being sued!) However, neither Legato, the tape
drive supplier, nor IBM are implicated in this fiasco.


_________________________________________________________________________
Adrian P Challinor                                 Osiris Consultants Ltd
                                        The Database Archival Specialists
e-mail: Adrian.Challinor AT osiris.co DOT uk
www: http://www.osiris.co.uk