Wait a second, why are you even backing up WINWORD.EXE anyway?  To me, that's
part of the Platform Image that would be put down on a system before a restore
is done.  Backup, in my opinion, is for data, not applications.  It may be
stretching the point a bit, but there should be no problem with having an
"exclude ?\...\*.exe" in DSM.OPT.  This is a DSM.OPT tuning issue more than
anything else.  For user workstation backups, the data flow should be very very
small.  Data files, customization (ini) files, and that's about it.

This position does not work as well on enterprise systems, where there is a lot
of data, and the total amount of data changed in a day is quite high, but then
you probably also have a more advanced network in place to reach that data.

Also, how many times does WINWORD.EXE change, anyway?  It should be backed up
once, and only once, at the most.  If you have multiple versions of WINWORD.EXE
on your ADSM Server, and you haven't upgraded the product, I'd be running that
virus checker.

Nick Cassimatis
nickpc AT us.ibm DOT com

If you don't have the time to do it right the first time, where will you find
the time to do it again?

Please respond to ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
cc:
Subject: Re: Is network backup still a good idea?


Hi Andreas!
We have used a product which uses both checksum testing and blocklevel
saving. This product is called ESM (Enterprise Storage Manager). When we
bought it, it was sold by Legent, it's now a CA product.
We found several downsides to both checksum testing and blocklevel
saving.
When you perform blocklevel testing you will have to perform a checksum
routine for every file (or at least for every file larger than xx Kb.).
This causes a lot of overhead. We saw a significant performance impact
on the slower clients!
Checksum testing looks like a nice feature. Why sending and storing one
file on the server more then once? Ok, when client1 stores WINWORD.EXE
and client2 just stores a pointer to the WINWORD.EXE on client1's tape,
you will need a extra tape mount when restoring C:\MSOFFICE on client2.
The restore time will definitely be slower in this case!
So believe me, you don't want to use both features. I can tell from
experience.
Kindest regards,
Eric van Loon