We were hit by the klez virus over the weekend. In trying to restore some files 
from pre infected state I found what appears to be a fatal flaw in the way I 
have versioning set up (or a "feature" in tsm). We are running win/nt 4.0 sp6a 
and tsm 4.2.1 client, the server is on aix and also 4.2.1. These are the parms 
I am using.


Versions Data Exists     NOLIMIT 
Versions Data Deleted  2 
Retain Extra Versions   33 
Retain Only Version     365 
Copy Mode                  MODIFIED 
Copy Serialization        SHRSTATIC 
Copy Frequency          0 

The idea was to be able to keep up to the last 33 days of changes to any given 
file. What happened is this - when our virus program detected the virus it 
renamed the files from .exe to .avb. Tivoli, it appears, did not make a 
distinction between the files and just backed up the new .avb file as a newer 
version of the .exe file. Since the .exe had not been changed since the end of 
November, the only good backup of that file was dropped because it was over 33 
days old.  I believe that this is what is occurring because when I look at the 
file details for these files (on the restore screen) I see this:

Name         Size     Modified     Created     Backed up
hqd.avb    98 kb  29-nov-01   02-mar-02  03-mar-02

Note that the create date is more than 3 months later than the modified date. 
My questions are:

1. does this sound like a bug in tsm?

2. is it more likely a problem in the way the anti-virus software is renaming 
the file?

3. Is there any was to tell tivoli to keep a certain minimum number of 
versions, something along the lines of a RETAIN MINIMUM VERSIONS so that both 
high and low water marks and be kept for any given copygroup?

Your help is greatly appreciated.

Cory Heikel
Sr. Systems engineer
Milton S. Hershey Medical Center
(717) 531-7972