Paul!  I didn't know you were one of "us" !

Ah yes - someone else who remembers the Good Ole operating system, that knew
how to SEPARATE user data and customization from the OS.  As a former
mainframe storage manager, MICROSOFT MAKES ME CRAZY, because they STILL
haven't figured that out.

Unfortunately, the "My Documents and Settings" concept STILL doesn't work
right; it lets you recover your files, but not your Windows customization.
(Although Win2K has improved it a bit).  Customization for your own software
is, in many cases, STILL in the registry.  So you can't restore your
customization without restoring the registry, and you can't restore the
registry without restoring the Program Files directory, so you pretty much
have to restore everything, since you STILL can't separate it.  I'm whining
about this AGAIN, just to point out there are sites where laying down a
"corporate image" isn't sufficient, and we are one of them.

At this site it's...  well, it's rocket science.  Really.  They have rocket
scientists running around here.  And Mathematicians.  And Physicists.  And
software developers and other university-type power users.

And they all have Windows desktops where they do software development, test
funky software you've never heard of, or download stuff from rocket
scientist web sites, for all I know... But anyway, NO TWO MACHINES are
alike, and if you give them a clean machine, it takes A LOT OF TIME to
reinstall all that unique software, and get their program development
software recustomized, and rocket scientists are a VERY EXPENSIVE COMMODITY
to spend their time dinking with Windows!

So here, at least, it's WORTH THE EXTRA FEW TAPES to take that basic backup
of 500 copies of Windows executables at about 300 mb each and give us the
ability to do bare metal restores of individual workstations, complete with
all the unique software and customization.

(In fact, I would ask these questions of ANYBODY in a program-development
environment:  Do you really have enough time/money that you want your
program developers working on customizing Bill Gate's software, instead of
working for you?  Don't they ever have deadlines?  Have you figured out how
much time they REALLY spend rebuilding their environment if you give them a
clean machine? Do you actually know how much you pay them, compared to the
cost of an extra tape?)

Anyway, recovery requirements can be DIFFERENT, if you are backing up
machines that are really used as WORKSTATIONS instead of Utility/Gateway
machines and as opposed to SERVERS.

And the COOL THING here is:  TSM can do it.  Our requirements are different
than most sites, and TSM can STILL handle it.

As Dwight Cook has said, I haven't run into much of anything I CAN"T handle
with TSM..

And, as many people have said, THERE IS NO SUBSTITUTE for understanding your
own environment.

And as I have said:  I can't believe people haven't figured out HOW
EXPENSIVE this "inexpensive" operating system is to support!

My rant of the day and nobody else's...

Wanda Prather