Hello my dear TSM friends,


Sorry, but I wil ask a lot of questions in this posting. Please, forgive me.

I have installed TSM only once on an RS/6000 machine (AIX 4.3.3-ML08).
First I had TSM 4.1.3, now I upgraded to 4.2.

In the 2 months I'm using TSM now I wrote a lot of scripts for reporting and
DRM.
Nonetheless I'm still wondering if I'm doing everything OK.

We didn't buy Disaster Recovery Manager so we do:

                - Backup during the day of portables
                - Backup of servers during the night -> first do disk, then 
migrated to
ptape_pool
                - In the early morning :
                        * an incremental backup of ptape_pool to offsite_1, 
offsite_2 or
offsite_3 (depends on the day)
                          (automatic checkin/checkout, ..)
                        * a db backup to the internal disks
                        * a copy of the .dbb files to rootvg (I'v made a 
seperate /tivoli for all
scripts, config info
                                                                          
diskpools, db vols, log vols).
                        * a systembackup of rootvg to 1/4 inch (internal) 
tapedrive


        In the weekend :
                - Archiving
                - Space reclametion
                - Expiration
                - ..

I tested my DRM scripts. It works like this :

                - Restore mksysb
                - Recreate /tivoli filesystem
                - Restore db and diskpool volumes
                - Remove scratch and cleaning tapes from db
                - Change Ptape_pool status to destroyed
                - Checkin new empty scratch tapes
                - Checkin offsite_copy
                - restore stgpool

This works all OK, but if my TSM DB becomes larger than the capacity of my
internal tapestreamer I will have a problem.
That's the reason for the following question :

I've seen that some of you do a db backup to a seperate tape in the library,
but :

Question 1:

   If everything is destroyed (machine and library), and you didn't buy DRM
(so you don't have a script
   created by DRM to put everything back from scratch), how do you read your
DB back from tape ??? You need at least your
   TSM DB to restore your offsite copy.  Or do you completely reinstall your
OS and reinstall TSM ? I almost
   can't believe the last thing because you still lost all the pointers to
your data on the offsite copy.
   Or is there a way to read that tape directly from your OS through the
special device name ?  (for example
   tar xvf /dev/rmt3 ??)

Question 2:

   Are there any rules to choose the exact size of the components in a TSM
Server ?
   For example :                - 25 Mb. RAM for each backupclient
                                - TSM DB size = 10 % of totalcapacity to backup
                                - CPU : ???

Question 3:

 - Can the experienced DSM'ers tell me some special advices ?  What
beginnermistakes did you guys made (and should I avoid)
 - What important reports can I make (I made a daily report to see if all
the schedules were finished completely, and
   one monthly report to see how many times all the portables were backed
up) ?
 - Any advices, tips, tricks ?