We do not back up the Windows System State, and I run a program to find
them, delete them, and change the cloptset for offending nodes to one
that forbids it. The problem started with Vista, and it hit us real
hard. It's a problem that keeps on giving, as people gradually upgrade
from XP to Win7 and from Server 2003 to Server 2008.

A pet peeve of mine in this regard is that XP calls it "System Object",
and TSM very inflexibly enforces this semantic detail. If you assign a
Vista+ node to a cloptset that contains DOMAIN -SYSTEMOBJECT you get a
fatal error and no backup. If you assign an XP node to a cloptset that
contains DOMAIN -SYSTEMSTATE you also get a fatal error. TSM should
accept SYSTEMSTATE and SYSTEMOBJECT as aliases for one another. This
would save me a ***___HUGE___*** amount of time and effort.

The difference in whether or not you can handle it, is the TSM server
version, as well as the client version. In general, neither V5 servers
nor V5 clients can handle System State backup, while V6.2.3+ servers can
deal with it reasonably well if the client is also V6.2.3+. This is
IBM's recommendation.

We have never found the System Object/State backup to be useful for a
desktop node restore. OTOH if the node is a server, we have started to
back up the System State to our new V6.2.3 server using V6.2.4+ clients.
We continue to absolutely forbid System State backups on our old V5.5
servers. They simply cannot handle it.

Roger Deschner      University of Illinois at Chicago     rogerd AT uic DOT edu
"My business, is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact,
not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations."
-- Thomas Huxley, 1860


On Wed, 25 Jul 2012, Zoltan Forray wrote:

>We are constantly seeing problems with Windows VSS and systemstate
>backups.  The recent "black Tuesday" updates has causes numerous Windows
>servers to start having backup problem where they previously worked just
>fine.
>
>In most cases they require the VSS hotfixes/fixpacks, etc.  The quickest
>fix is to simply stop systemstate backups since VSS patches usually require
>reboots.
>
>I bought up the issue of "have we ever restored the systemstate or any
>objects within" and the response was "No, Never".
>
>So I am wondering, how many folks here who backup Windows servers, include
>SYSTEMSTATE backups and why?
>
>--
>*Zoltan Forray*
>TSM Software & Hardware Administrator
>Virginia Commonwealth University
>UCC/Office of Technology Services
>zforray AT vcu DOT edu - 804-828-4807
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