I've been following the comments on using Archive to meet the requirements
of long term data storage asked by someone else on the list. I have the same
sort of requirement and imagine most everyone does. Our requirement is 30
copies plus 1 monthly copy kept for 6 months.

If I understand Archive correctly I will be making a complete copy of my
data and keeping it in an Archive pool. Does this mean that I am basically
doing a complete copy of our disk farm every thirty days? With the ever
growing size of disk farms that seems to be a problem. Based on the
performance of our daily backups it would take days and days for this to
complete for us.

At this point I've set versions to 9999 and age them off at 186 days.
Granted this creates way more than the number of copies than I want to keep
or have a requirement to keep. We have over 1 TB of disk spinning ...I'm
sure I'm missing something here. Everytime I read the Sys Admin Guide
discussing the setup and management of storagepools I think I have it until
I starting thinking about it again!

For some of the larger shops out there ... Do you make Archives of
everything on some interval ? If you do what kind of timeframe for
completion of the Archive?

Curt Magura
Lockheed Martin
Enterprise Information Systems
Gaithersburg Md.
301-240-6305