Curtis,

It could actually be much worse than that, as we have discovered.
The default behavior of Archive is to FOLLOW SYMBOLIC LINKS.  Thus if
you have a 10GB file on a client, and there is a symbolic link to it
somewhere else on the client, Archive will actually copy the 10GB of
data twice, rather than just copying the link itself as Backup does.  To
make it even worse, if the symbolic link is to a directory, the entire
directory structure and all of its files will get backed up twice.  If
there are TWO links, you get THREE copies on the server, etc.  The worst
news of all is, YOU CAN'T TURN IT OFF.  That's the way Archive works,
period.

What we wanted to do was make an archive of an entire system to satisfy
regulatory requirements.  the system in question has about 57 GBytes of
data on its disks.  The archive backed up 175 GBytes & took 27 hours!

Special note for HP users: If you have a 10.x system that was upgraded
from 9.x, or even installed as 10.01 (I think), you may have HP's
"transitional links" installed.  This feature will guarantee you get
results like ours!

Our work around was to not do Archives at all, but instead create a
separate node name and policy domain and management claess, etc. with
the required retention.

I have heard a rumor that IBM is going to "fix" this "feature" of
Archive via PTF in June... I'm keeping my fingers crossed!

Robin Sharpe
Berlex Labs