You wrote:

>This is as it should be.  The intent of archival operations is to preserve
>images of data at given points in time, to serve versioning, legal, and
>other needs.  A symbolic link is only an allusion to data and just doesn't
>fit the paradigm.  The purpose of Archive is to capture data at any given
>instant in time, and that's what it does.  It does not capture symbolic
>links or directories (though it remembers the directory structure for
>basic reconstruction upon Recall).

But a symbolic link is a directory entry, a self contained entity so to speak.
Therefore by following the link, rather than merely acknowledging it, ADSM
is NOT providing a true copy of the data. Furthermore, there is also the weaker
argument that ADSM's behaviour is inconsistent with that of the other archival
utilities, such as tar, backup, etc, which follow the links. Ignoring both of
these
points, it would still be highly desirable to have the option, "To follow or not
to follow that is the question. Whether tis nobler in the mind to store the data
again, or just the pointer to it.... " (Apologies to W. Shakespeare)

>Customers are trying to use Archive to make archival "backups" outside of
>the Backup function due the the cumbersomeness of Backup retention
>rule sets and because it remains exceedingly awkward to select Management
>Class even in ADSMv3.

This is a point, I've always seen 'archive' as movement from the system into
long-term
storage. I could put up with archives shortcomings, if there was a way of
'snapshotting'
a filesystem, that is basically taking an ADSM analogue to a tar/ufsdump/mksysb
etc
and keeping it for a number of versions indefinitely.

As they say elsewhere, "jsut my two cents worth"

Bob Cross.

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