On Nov 14, 2005, at 3:19 PM, Jones, Eric J wrote:

...We normally just run incremental for all our machines and over the
years
the data gets scattered every where(number of tapes and in some cases
30+) so restores can be very slow. ...

Eric -

The magic word "collocation" does not appear in your posting. It is the
standard means by which data, related by node or filespace, is kept
together. That, plus reclamation, minimizes the number of tapes needed
to
perform a restoral.

Being a full-featured product, TSM provides a host of capabilities by
which
one may satisfy enterprise data recovery needs. A storage pool hierarchy
involving frontal disk, migration, caching, and copy storage pools will
allow quick restoral of most recent data. Full backups can be done, but
are
often testimony to an ill-thought-out backup/restore architecture.

Review redbook "IBM Tivoli Storage Management Concepts" and the
Administration
Guide manual for methods by which client-sent data may be managed. This
topic is also
heavily represented in the List archives. A good data recovery design
focuses first on
restoral methodologies and performance, then looks at realistic
approaches to backup
to facilitate restoral.

    Richard Sims