Hi Andy,

you are quite right, 
one should never ignore vendors backup requirements,
I agree with you this vere a bad idea.

Maybe having been misunderstood, I will repeat myself:

In addition to your statements 
I still propose to speak about restore requirements 
inspite of backup requirements whenever possible.

As trivial and natural this change sounds to be,
it is a major paradigm change
which easily leads to better understanding of real requirements,
even in the case of experienced users and vendors.

Can you suggest/imagine any backup requirement
where there is no restore requirement behind it?
And be they implicit/instictive only, restore
requirements are what enforces all backups.
So why most of us always speak about backup requirements
but almost never about restore requirements?
For me this is a historical misconception only.

Restore requirements enforce backup recommendations,
the opposite is not true at all, 
there is a one-way dependency between those two.

Backup requirements defined per se 
easily turn to be either superfluos or even insufficient
when later cross-checked against actual restore requirements.

regards
Juraj Salak

P.S. by the way - *SM is one of very few products which
support  - through management classes - this way of thinkink