=> On Thu, 7 Oct 1999 09:51:26 -0400, Nick Cassimatis <nickpc AT US.IBM DOT 
COM> said:

> What I did is I created a seperate Policy Domain (I am doing absolute (full)
> backups once a week of certain systems - I'll explain why below), Policy
> Set, Mgmt Class, Archive/Backup copy groups on the server, detailing them
> with the data retention values that I wanted.  I then created a seperate
> node name for the client

[ ... cogent description of multinode config ... ]


I maintain the somewhat narrow-minded position that most of the needs to do
"full backups" represent incomplete Acceptance Of The True Way. :)

Nevertheless, watching this discussion go by, I keep wondering: Why not
develop several Archive management classes with weekly-ish, monthly-ish, and
yearly-ish expiration characteristics.  Then you could:

Weekly-ish:  retain for (say) 10 days
Monthly-ish: retain for (say) 450 days
Yearly-ish:  retain indefinitely

Every day, dsmc archive -archmc="weekly-ish" /this /that /other

Every month, dsmc archive -archmc="monthly-ish" /this /that /other

Every year, dsmc archive -archmc="yearly-ish" /this /that /other


This assures that you have your dailies a week later, plus some slop to pull a
Scotty out of.  Monthlies for more than a year, and yearlies until you decide
to clear some tapes.

The only limitation to this approach (and it's a doozy) is that it takes a
bloody long time to complete.  Who knows, if TSM's ballyhooed
make-an-archive-from-existing-backup-data feature comes through, it could
become reasonable.



Allen S. Rout