Is there any other way to backup GroupWise (hot-online backup); I don't
like the idea of shutting down e-mail system in the middle of the night,
and than pray that after postsched command it will wake up again.

Joe,

There is no TDP/Groupwise.  I'm not sure about the mechanism for shutting
down/starting Groupwise.  I would share your concern about
stopping/restarting their mail server.  This could potentially cause
problems with other processes elsewhere in their environment that depend on
mail being available (alerting would be one).

I belive that the solution recommended by IBM is to use St. Bernard's Open
File Manager, or something like that, if there is a competing product for
the Novell platform.

One thing you want to be careful of with Groupwise is how your policies are
set up.

The last time I worked with a Groupwise server as a TSM client (several
years ago), the way that the product stored the messages was in uniquely
named files.  Periodically, Groupwise would "re-org" these files, deleting
the old uniquely named files and creating new ones.

At the time that we configured the policies for that organization, we were
not aware of this behavior,  and we used the same settings as the rest of
the servers for the company - which included a long retonly setting.

This wound up causing some real capacity issues - the ratio of data managed
to live data on that client went well into the hundreds-to-one range.

As I said, it's been a while since I worked with Groupwise, and the
product's behavior may have changed since then, but it's definitely worth
taking a look at...

Ted