> We are in about the same situation.

Us too.  And, to make matters worse for us, we run our DCE/DFS Servers on
Sun, under Solaris, which does not even have a DFS client!  We have an AIX
box that mounts the DFS tree, and does the virtualmountpoint thing.  I
have 26 mountpoints, one for each letter of the alphabet.

Since file level restores are important here, we will probably continue to
do backups with this method.  As for the backup loops that can be caused
if a user mounts part of the tree in their filesets, we will deal with
that if/when it happens.  We have a ticket open with Transarc about this,
but it does not seem to be going anywhere...

Our larger problem is with DFS server disaster recovery, including the
loss of an aggregate.  Since our aggregates are stripped across volumes
(vxvm/vxfs), the loss of an aggregate does not equate in any way, shape,
or form to the way we backup the data.  We would have a very difficult
time knowing what to restore.  For this reason, we will probably do both
file level backups, and butc(a) backups for disaster recovery.  These will
also have to be done via an AIX box.


Steve (unVMix Systems Programmer/Dude) Roder
(tkssteve AT ubvm.cc.buffalo DOT edu | tkssteve AT acsu.buffalo DOT edu | 
(716)645-3564 ,
   | http://ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu/~tkssteve)