Just a little comment on #2...the pre/postschedule commands run every time
you run a schedule against that node! So if you were to maybe run a
CLIENTACTION against the node to do a special backup of a file/directory,
not necessarily the whole server, you're shutting down your database. If
that's in the middle of the day, the users ain't gonna be to happy with ya.
For Orcale COLD backups, we have a shell script that shuts down the Oracle
instance, does other maintenance tasks then calls DSMC I to do an
incremental backup, Checks the return code and alerts on != 0 and then
restarts Oracle instance.

We have found this works better than the pre/post commands. We can do a
better job of return code checking of Oracle tasks before running the
backup. Now with the new and improved! return code checking in V5.1 maybe we
could make it work, but you gotta remember that this command will be run
every time you run a schedule against the node!!

Bill Boyer
DSS, Inc.