John,

It seems to me that what is in order here is either a complete
re-read of the ADSM administrator's guide, or a reconsideration
of ADSM as your backup solution.

As has often been discussed on this list in the past, ADSM is
fundamentally a different type of backup solution than those
that you've mentioned. There are many ways in which you can try
to force ADSM to do things the way the other "more traditional"
backup products do. When you begin to invest a large amount
of time in working around the way ADSM is designed, however,
you must begin to ask yourself the question of whether or not
ADSM is right for your environment, especially after having
invested a large amount of money in the software and hardware
necessary to run an ADSM installation.

By design, ADSM lacks certain capabilities that other products
have. These are not oversights on the part of the developers
(in most cases :-), they are conscious decisions, based on the
idea that this is a better way of doing backups, that there is
no reason to spend bandwidth sending files to a backup server
that already has copies of the same files.

You might do well to search the archives of this list, as the
topic of "this is not your father's backup solution" has led to
some very interesting discussions about the philosophy of ADSM.
There are also many ideas of how to work with your internal
customers to pursuade them that creating a 'towers of Hanoi'
schedule of full and incremental backups is not the only solution
to doing backups. In many cases it is simply an exercise in
educating the users. In our group we often tell people, "don't
give us solutions, tell us your problems and we will propose
solutions to them."

 -- Tom

Thomas A. La Porte
DreamWorks Feature Animation
tlaporte AT anim.dreamworks DOT com

On Mon, 28 Jun 1999, John Schneider wrote:

>Greetings,
>    I would like y'alls input on how to handle tape rotation offsite.
>The
>operations group I am working with wants to be able to ship boxes of
>tapes out, and get them back according to a simple rotation scheme.
>This is easy to do with products like Legato or Omniback.  It is a
>pain to do with ADSM.  They want to:

[Explanation of possible alternatives deleted.]

>
>***********************************************************************
>* John D. Schneider       Email: jdschn AT ibm DOT net * Phone: 314-349-4556
>* Lowery Systems, Inc.
>* 1329 Horan                  Disclaimer: Opinions expressed here are
>* Fenton, MO 63026                   mine and mine alone.
>***********************************************************************
>