Domains and sets exist for logical grouping in what ever manor fits
     your needs!
     Management classes & copy groups are there for sub-grouping (in what
     ever manor fits your needs)

     I'm not sure if you will find any "theory" on it...

     Example, you could make different policy domains for different
     departments, geographical locations, different platforms, different
     functionality, ...  Then the management classes allow you to provide
     (what you feel is adequate) a "default" management class for coverage
     and additional management classes for special cases where the client
     binds files to that management class with INCLUDE statements (for
     incremental/selective processing) or with the -ARCHMC=xxxx (for
     archive processing)

     Say you have a situation of desktopPC (win95), small lan server
     (novell), and in intermediate server (aix).  People are doing work on
     their PCs and on shared space on the novell server from which selected
     files are ported to the aix server for mass processing... you might
     want a domain for the desktop with a default bkupmgmt of 7 versions
     exist (VE) and 3 versions deleted (VD.... ohhhh) 'cause an individual
     should be able to tell they screwed up one of their files within 7
     versions.  On the novell server, since many are accessing the same
     files you might want 14 VE & 7 VD then cause the AIX server does the
     most critical work (where you might have to go back to last months
     data) you might want a 35 VE & 35 VD.
        OR
     you have 3 departments off the same LAN (with different lan servers)
     you might want to assign each department's desktop PCs to a different
     domain AND assign each department's LAN Server to a different domain
     so you could easily identify (by domain) who has how much data on the
     adsm server, for billing purposes ;-)
     (q auditocc domain=xxx)
        OR
     basically what ever fits your needs... if you have no big billing
     issues or disaster recovery requirements or special long term storage
     needs you could just register all your nodes in the generic "standard"
     domain created upon installation.

     You didn't mention archive copy groups in your question but here is
     how I use them...

     I'm not a bean counter, I'm a computer dweeb... How long info is kept
     to keep the IRS happy is not my concern!  I set up, where needed, a
     management classes with no backup copy group and archive retentions of
     35 days, 95 days, 185 days, 370 days, and the latest of 3,666 days
     (1 month, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, and 10 years...)
     it is up to the DBAs and accountants to do a
     dsmc archive xxxcriticalfilesxxx -archmc=ARC370 -pass=yyy
     with the ARCH10YR I put it into an isolated storage pool that I
     perform a daily offsite "backup stg mainpool copypool" that uses
     server-to-server communications to dump the copy to an offsite adsm
     server.

     Well, I'm WAYYYY past one screen here on my reply so I'll shut up now.

     later,
           Dwight




______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________
Subject: Newbie Question
Author:  TMINK (TMINK AT MERCY.PMHS DOT ORG) at unix,mime
Date:    2/2/99 9:03 AM


Can anyone help me find information on the theory behind the Policy Domains,
Policy Sets, Management Classes, and Backup Copy Groups.  What objects are
dependent on one another and why they exist.  Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks.

-Troy
=========================================================================