We were hit by the klez virus over the weekend. In trying to restore some
files from pre infected state I found what appears to be a fatal flaw in =
the
way I have versioning set up (or a "feature" in tsm). We are running =
win/nt
4.0 sp6a and tsm 4.2.1 client, the server is on aix and also 4.2.1. These
are the parms I am using.


Versions Data Exists     NOLIMIT
Versions Data Deleted  2
Retain Extra Versions   33
Retain Only Version     365
Copy Mode                  MODIFIED
Copy Serialization        SHRSTATIC
Copy Frequency          0

The idea was to be able to keep up to the last 33 days of changes to any
given file. What happened is this - when our virus program detected the
virus it renamed the files from .exe to .avb. Tivoli, it appears, did not
make a distinction between the files and just backed up the new .avb file =
as
a newer version of the .exe file. Since the .exe had not been changed =
since
the end of November, the only good backup of that file was dropped because
it was over 33 days old.  I believe that this is what is occurring because
when I look at the file details for these files (on the restore screen) I
see this:

Name         Size     Modified     Created     Backed up
hqd.avb    98 kb  29-nov-01   02-mar-02  03-mar-02

Note that the create date is more than 3 months later than the modified
date. My questions are:

1. does this sound like a bug in tsm?

2. is it more likely a problem in the way the anti-virus software is
renaming the file?

3. Is there any was to tell tivoli to keep a certain minimum number of
versions, something along the lines of a RETAIN MINIMUM VERSIONS so that
both high and low water marks and be kept for any given copygroup?

Your help is greatly appreciated.

Cory Heikel
Sr. Systems engineer
Milton S. Hershey Medical Center
(717) 531-7972