This "once a month snapshot" idea is a hangover from old manual tape handling 
procedures
The user attitude is that they want exactly the same functionality that they 
had, whether or not it is needed.

I'm still fighting the good fight on this one, but one way to handle this is to 
set retonly to be 13 months (or whatever retention period they want the monthly 
backups to last) and just get them to name or rename their long term storage 
files to something unique e.g. with a date in it) and then delete it after is 
backed up. i.e. files that are "machine generated" with unique names 
effectively provide a long-term storage facility without extra TSM admin 
hassles.

Steve. 

>>> "Gill, Geoffrey L." <GEOFFREY.L.GILL AT SAIC DOT COM> 20/12/2000 5:18:37 >>>
>We have some users who want to do full monthly backups and keep these
>separate from the normal backups (ie. do a backup once a month
>and keep for
>1 year).
>
>We do this via the Archive, but it has it's limitations:
>- must specify each drive letter/ file system
>- can't archive all of the WIN2K System Ojbects

I also do "monthly archives" for some of our people, with more coming. In my
opinion, and this is the way I specify to my customers, an archive is
supposed to be the data that is most important to their contract/work. To me
this means you can probably eliminate the C: drive altogether.

I don't see that as a limitation, instead I see it as the best way to keep
people from archiving superfulous things that just take up space in the
database anyway. Just think how fast that many objects can add up if you
have 100 or so clients to archive. A "full monthly backup" is probably not
going to be used for anything by the time 9 months has gone by. Who in the
world would want to recover a system that far in the past? I believe it's
the customer data they'd be looking for so why not just archive that to
begin with?

Geoff
Just my thoughts, I know not everyone will agree....