In my humble opinion, you are EXACTLY right.  I believe that we need to do a
better job of explaining what ADSM can do, and why different in this case
really is better.

And even if there is some nebulous "requirement", how would you really run it
anyway?  For example, someone was talking about keeping everything from a
NetWare server for this purpose.  Well, you'd better not change any of the
Hardware on that server, or have documented exactly what the server looked
like each time you take a backup, or it will never come up after you do
restore it.

"When I was a lad learning the Systems Programming trade" many years ago, I
remember my boss being in a panic because a law suit that was being brought
against us was requiring that we be able to run a series of programs EXACTLY
the way they had been run at the time of the supposed illegality.  Even on an
MVS system, with all of those weekly, monthly and yearly backups, my boss
felt it couldn't be done.  Why was she in a dither?  For exactly the same
reason - the hardware from the backups no longer existed, and the supporting
software to gen the systems was not available (except on the backup tapes -
Catch 22 is at it again).

I believe that we owe it to our customers to explain to them what their
liability is, and clearly explain what we reasonably can and cannot do.

End of Soapbox.

Jerry Lawson
jlawson AT thehartford DOT com


______________________________ Forward Header __________________________________
Subject: Re: Full backup whit client NT
Author:  INTERNET.OWNERAD at SNADGATE
Date:    6/10/97 6:14 PM


--- Message Part 1.1: Text Body Part ------------------------------
And it goes even further than not understanding ADSM.  The problem comes from
And it goes even further than not understanding ADSM.  The problem comes from
believing the way it has always been done is the best way.  Weekly full backups
kept for a year, daily incrementals kept for a few weeks.  This method has
always allowed the customer to recover to some distant point in the past.  Why?
Not because he really needed to, but because he could!

This is really a "just in case" mentality at work.  There are probably no
regulatory requirements to save "all" data, but rather a r equirement to save
"all" data of a specific type, say payroll data.  Saving all payroll data is
fairly simple, even on a daily basis .  Saving all data is much harder.
Somebody needs to start raising the awareness of what archive really is.

Kelly