How about a backupset of every node on that day?  Of course, it would have
to be "today" I guess...
Robin Sharpe
Berlex Labs



                    "Cook, Dwight
                    E"
                    <DWIGHT.E.COOK To:    ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
                    @SAIC.COM>     cc:
                    Sent by:       Subject:
                    "ADSM: Dist           Re: Eternal Data retention 
brainstorming.....
                    Stor Manager"
                    <ADSM-L AT VM DOT MAR
                    IST.EDU>


                    08/16/02 07:09
                    AM
                    Please respond
                    to "ADSM: Dist
                    Stor Manager"





Tell the legal department you want a complete duplicate of you TSM
environment !!!!!!!!!!!
People make so many unrealistic request with absolutely no thought as to
what they are asking for.

The only way to do that is to make a handful of tsm db backups (to protect
against loss due to media failure)
then take those and ALL private media, box it up and stick it in a hole
somewhere.

Then if they ever want anything from it, you could do like the last half of
your #4 option...

Yes, I've had this request before, but it was only for a subset of nodes, I
exported them.
Took me about a month to do, while I was doing it I turned expiration off,
just about ran out of ATL space during the process.  I told myself I WOULD
NEVER DO THAT AGAIN!

If they really want the data, then cost is no object !
and say 400 TB on 3590 "K" tapes at 3/1 compression is only about 3,333
tapes, at just under $55 ea that is only $183,333.00
CHEAP ! ! !
(oh, that's my supplier's price on "K" tapes, if that is good or bad ???)

Dwight



-
-----Original Message-----
From: bbullock [mailto:bbullock AT MICRON DOT COM]
Sent: Thursday, August 15, 2002 2:31 PM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: Eternal Data retention brainstorming.....


        Folks,
        I have a theoretical question about retaining TSM data in an
unusual
way. Let me explain.

        Lets say legal comes to you and says that we need to keep all TSM
data backed up to a certain date, because of some legal investigation
(NAFTA, FBI, NSA, MIB, insert your favorite govt. entity here). They want a
snapshot saved of the data in TSM on that date.

        Anybody out there ever encounter that yet?

        On other backup products that are not as sophisticated as TSM, you
just pull the tapes, set them aside and use new tapes. With TSM and it's
database, it's not that simple. Pulling the tapes will do nothing, as the
data will still expire from the database.

        The most obvious way to do this would be to:

1. Export the data to tapes & store them in a safe location till some day.
This looks like the best way on the surface, but with over 400TB of data in
our TSM environment, it would take a long time to get done and cost a lot
if
they could not come up with a list of hosts/filespaces they are interested
in.

        Assuming #1 is unfeasible, I'm exploring other more complex ideas.
These are rough and perhaps not thought through all the way, so feel free
to
pick them apart.

2. Turn off "expire inventory" until the investigation is complete. This
one
is really scary as who knows how long an investigation will take, and the
TSM databases and tape usage would grow very rapidly.

3. Run some 'as-yet-unknown' "expire inventory" option that will only
expire
data backed up ~since~ the date in question.

4. Make a copy of the TSM database and save it. Set the "reuse delay" on
all
the storage pools to "999", so that old data on tapes will not be
overwritten.
        In this case, the volume of tapes would still grow (and need to
perhaps be stored out side of the tape libraries), but the database would
remain stable because data is still expiring on the "real" TSM database.
        To restore the data from one of those old tapes would be complex,
as
I would need to restore the database to a test host, connect it to a drive
and "pretend" to be the real TSM server and restore the older data.

5. Create new domains on the TSM server (duplicates of the current
domains).
Move all the nodes to the new domains (using the 'update node ...
-domain=..' ). Change all the retentions for data in the old domains to
never expire. I'm kind of unclear on how the data would react to this.
Would
it be re-bound to the new management classes in the new domain? If the
management classes were called the same, would the data expire anyways?

        Any other great ideas out there on how to accomplish this?

Thanks,
Ben