In my experimentations with ADSM, I have run accross a few things that
I find annoying.  However, since I'm fairly new to the client/server and
PC area, I'm not sure whether they would be considered bugs or features
of the product.  I'd appreciate your opinions.  All of these situations are
related to the VM server and the OS/2 client.

1. There is an environment variable, DSM_CONFIG which is set in the CONFIG.SYS.
   It defines the name of your options file, usually \ADSM\DSM.OPT.  If you
   change this variable, the command line client appears to respect it fine.
   However, the GUI interface does not.  It still tries to find DSM.OPT
   regardless of what the DSM_CONFIG variable is.  Is there any reason for
   this?

2. Lets say you have some excludes defined in your options file.  The user
   goes into the GUI and tries to do a selective backup.  They use the
   directory tree feature.  They can see all the files on their machine,
   including ones that have been excluded.  However, if they try to select
   an excluded file, the program does nothing with it.  The problem is, the
   program never tells the user why its not selecting the file.  I tripped
   on this myself and was very fustrated for awhile until I realized what
   was going on.  I would select a file, it looked like it was selected.
   However, when I hit LIST SELECTIONS, the program would say that nothing
   had been selected.  IMHO that is very confusing to users.

3. This is actually the BIG one that I tripped over.  I was experimenting
   with using INCLUDE and EXCLUDE in the options file.  I defined them so
   that only a few subdirectories would be included in the backup and all
   others would be excluded.  My assumption was that the files that were
   already backed up would remain in the server eventhough they were
   now excluded.  To my surprize however, when the backup ran, it expired
   all the files that were excluded.  I ended up blowing away my entire
   backup of my machine.  One question is, is this the way its intended to
   work?  My suspicion is that the answer is YES.  My concern, however, is
   about how easy it was to do.  All it takes is a typo or a wrong INCLUDE/
   EXCLUDE statement and bam!  Also, unless you are paying scrupulous
   attention to the backup, the user may not be aware that its happened.
   Lets face it, most users won't have a clue what they are looking at.  At
   least mine won't pay any attention.  However, when they absolutely, must
   restore that important file, how do you explain to them that they haven't
   been backing it up for 3 months?  There needs to be better protection.

Please let me know what you think...Thanks.  %-)

Martha