Alex,

I have read through your response and I can understand your position.
However, firat I would like to point out that the TSM documentation is
not always clear and is not always consistant.  The text you quoted from
the Admin Guide is an example of them not being consistant.  Clearly
what they are describing there is a "incremental -incrbydate" type
backup.  And as I stated earlier you can consider it a "partial
incremental", but that does not mean that a "partial incremental is only
acheived by "incremental -incrbydate", that's like saying "I live in
Texas therefore I am a Texan and an American" based on that fact I can
say all Texan's are Americans, but not all Americans are Texans.

I will concede that there is places within the documentation that refers
to the "-incrbydate" option as beeing a "partial backup" and I can show
you IBM/Tivoli education material that describes a partial exactly as I
did in my note.  But rather than nit picking the symantics I would like
to re-phrase my explanation,  Instead of calling it "full incremental"
and "partial incremental" maybe we should use full and non-full.  The
key here is what happens when you don't use "full incrementals", in
particular the Last Incremental Date ( what I refer to as the LID) does
not get updated.  This is a critical peice of information.  Much of the
documentations explanation for other processes are assumming that you
are doing fulls since it keys off of the LID.  In addition, what other
processing is being effected by your "non-full incremental" (filespec
limited or -incrbydate option), i.e. file expiration, rebinding, missed
files etc.

The point that I am really trying to make is you should always be doing
full incremental backups!  The only time to consider anything else is if
there is a severe time constraint on the backup window.

I think this thread has been great.  It has given people a look at how,
what and why TSM is doing what it does.



--
Regards,
Mark D. Rodriguez
President MDR Consulting, Inc.

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