Hi All,

I'm attempting to move TSM from being a point backup solution for a particular 
application to an enterprise solution, in an environment where the customer is 
king (and thinks he knows it all).

As most application owners are used to individual tape dumps, I'm getting a lot 
of requests to just duplicate what the tapes did, i.e daily backup kept for a 
week, a weekly archive kept for a month and and a monthly archive kept for a 
year, with no exclusions.

I inherited the management classes here and the default is unlimited versions, 
retextra 28, retonly 365

So far I've kept with this as it mostly saves me having to run those monthly 
archives, but as the empire expands I'm having a lot of trouble with temporary 
and uniquely named files  hanging around for a full year.  Its not a problem 
now but will be if I don't address the issue. I started coding exclude lists, 
but as every machine has a different setup it is hard to come up with general 
rules (e.g. two NT servers set up and maintained by the same people, one has 
oracle archive logs in \oraarchive and the other in \ora_archive)  so the   
task will quickly get out of hand.

I can encourage users in the long term as we will soon set up a billing 
strategy, but it is a government department and it will take at least a year 
for billing to bite.

So, what default retentions are you using? and how do you discourage monthly 
archives of everything?

To keep traffic on the list down, email direct to steve_harris AT 
health.qld.gov DOT au and I'll collate and post a summary.

Thanks

Steve.