This made me think as well you could use the robocopy command to run in 
"preview" mode to a log file I believe with the copy feature of last access or 
modify.  This might give you a list of what data would not get backed up and 
thus give the customer something to go on.

(I must really seem like a "RoboCopy" advocate.  Well I've done a ton of file 
server migrations the past few years.  Its incremental copy reminds me of TSM, 
without all the great bells and whistles of TSM of course ;-D).

Richard Sims <rbs AT BU DOT EDU> wrote:
On May 20, 2005, at 1:30 PM, Joe Crnjanski wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> I received a weird request from potential customer. Because we will
> charge him per space occupied on our server, he wants to backup only
> files less than a year old. He doesn't want to go into each folder and
> try to find files that meet the criteria. I know that Arcserve has
> that
> filter option.
>
> I don't think that we can do it with TSM, but before give him an
> answer
> I thought I would check opinion of The List.
>

In Unix you could readily do for the home directory this via:
find ~ -mtime -365 -print > /tmp/files_list
dsmc i -FILEList=/tmp/files_list
(Resulting names containing spaces would require quoting; but that could
be readily added via an appropriate command pipe-inserted between the
'find' and the redirect.)

Something similar could be done in other environments.

Another option for the user is the have the TSM client compress the data
being sent to the TSM server.

Yet another approach, even much simpler from the standpoint of the
backup,
is for the user to move his older, less relevant data into an oldies
folder and Exclude that from backup. It's a common practice to move old
data into a "back room" folder anyway. You could make it a site standard
that user folders with a special oldies name would not be backed up,
which
would take care of things for this and similarly cheap users. The TSM
client Expire command can be used to more quickly remove old stuff from
server storage.

Richard Sims


                
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