-----Zoltan Forray wrote: -----

>What are the factors that determine if a file/filesystem is "new" vs
>"already there - this is just a new backup".
>
>Given the following scenario:
>
>1.  Box "A" has existing backups.
>2. Create a clone of box "A" - call it "B" . "B" is identical in
>*EVERY* way as far as the filesystem/OS is concerned. Only required
>changes are the IP address and hostname.  The DSM.SYS is copied
>from  box "A".
>3.  We turn off box "A" backups and now want to backup box "B"
>
>Would the first backup of "B" consider everything "brand new" and
>ignore/flush all existing backups or would it not notice anything
>different and just think it is a normal, daily backup?
>
>How can we accomplish this without flushing existing backups or
>doing a complete "first pass" backup of everything ?
>
>The boxes in question are Solaris and/or Linux.

You don't say whether the dsm.sys file has a 'nodename' line.
If it does not, the first backup of B will undoubtedly be a
full backup, since B will be a different node than A.

If the node names do in fact match, I would expect just a typical
daily backup, if the file system contents are completely identical.
We have never cloned an entire system as described above, but we
have copied disk contents to new hardware many times. We have found
that file oriented copying mechanisms such as rsync usually change
the inode number associated with specific file name. This does not
cause all the affected files to be backed up, but does cause TSM toupdate
the attributes of all those files.