I don't know yet what the pros and cons are, but the "image incremental"
backups look interesting.

Anyone out there using these yet? (Or are they a new feature?)

Thanks, [RC]





                "Adam Sulis"
                <Sulis.AJ@FORC
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Subject
                IST.EDU>               TSM DR Exercise Restore Ideas


                01/13/2005
                07:56 AM


                Please respond
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Hi All:

I am looking for suggestions to improve efficiency in our Backup strategy:

Current:
We backup 200 nodes to a DASD diskpool (large enough for one day's backup),
then migrate to a VTS, with an offiste copy going to 3490 (uncollocated, of
course). To improve day-to-day restores, we implemented a weekly
full-backup
for our nodes. This means that restores come from a maximum of the last 1
week's worth of tapes (only need the active versions of the files). Also,
these full backups make our Disaster Recovery restores easier to work with
(when we get to the DR location, we call for tapes from the past weekend,
and all incrementals since. The problem is that we only have the
city-to-city bandwidth to offer weekly full backups to the nodes
participating in the DR plan...

Proposed:
What I would like to do is remove the VTS, have the backups direct to DASD,
then migrate to a collocated 3490, with an offiste copy same as before.
Having done this, we would have improved backup performace for all nodes,
and provided great restore performance for all nodes.

Problem: Without weekly full backups, the offsite tapes required for a
restore would grow to a huge number (Operating System files would be on a
very early tape, and every tape generated since would have incremental data
for that node). Is there any way to make a shorter list of tapes required
for DR? How is everyone else dealing with the offsite tapes? Again, we are
only interested in the "active versions". I could aggressively reclaim the
offsite pool to create newer tapes, but that's a lot of TSM thrashing for
little gain (still cannot say to the vault "send me all tapes since last
Saturday". Daily backupsets do not work within the DR plan, as far as I can
tell. (Unless I can generate a backupset to remain inside TSM, which would
get copied to the offsite daily, and still be available at the DR site...

I must be missing a command or a concept - how is everyone else doing this?
Any thoughts appreciated.


Adam Sulis
DNIS6-5
2nd Floor, Tunney's Pasture L002
Tel (613) 998-9093
Sulis.AJ AT forces.gc DOT ca




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