Hot Diggety! Seay, Paul was rumored to have written:
>
> What you have to do is revisit what you are saving and put in exclude.dirs
> for all directories that contain software that can be rebuilt from a common
> desktop image (hard drive replacment).  Have your users save their documents
> in specific folders and only back them up.  Then they just have to customize
> their desktop configure their node name in the dsm.opt and restore the stuff
> that is backed up.
>
> This is the trade-off.

Makes sense. Basic education + cost saving vs expense from a brute force
approach. The trick is to have education that works well for a wide range
of users, with differing expertise, and to also clearly communicate
expectations ("if you save anywhere else, you won't get it back!").

Now that sounds like I also have to train them to not just blindly click
whenever an application offers them a default directory (often within app
area) to store documents in.

Perhaps a small data area carved out on the hard drive, like say, 5 GB
partition for user documents as Z: or whatever, and similiarly for other
platforms (/userdocs/<user> as a symlink from ~user/docs or whatever), to
provide a consistent and easy-to-use area for end user, yet predictable area
for mass-deployed *SM configurations to use.

I'm sure that the IT shop can help out significantly if they're able to
preconfigure these settings within each application before users gets their
hands on the machine. Hard part is when not every place has that luxury,
especially at smaller places where end users may be configuring everything
on their own.

Anyway, the overall education/training approach is definitely cheaper than
having to save everything on the HD, I do agree. ;)

-Dan Foster
IP Systems Engineering (IPSE)
IP Systems Engineering (IPSE)
Global Crossing Telecommunications