Original requirement:
 the environment is w2k and nt client nodes (over 200) and in near future
 w2003.
 short description of my problem:
 i have to archive data for long time retention, with the possibility to
 recover servers completely out of this archived data.

>thank you for your comment, using ntbackup was one of our suggestions to
>solve this problem.
>in my opinion the solution with ntbackup will work, but the customer don't
>want to have it.
>
>what about generating backupsets instead of archiving the data. is it
>possible to restore a complete server
>with a backupset?
>
> the problem will be the large amount of tapes for the backupsets.

I think your customer's requirements are confused and vaguely defined, and that
is making the contemplation of solution confusing.

Your users are seemingly thinking of "the computer system" as their data, and
are thus requiring that the whole think be preserved as an entity.  That's
faulty thinking, and thwarts the enterprise management of business data.
The business data should be physically and logically separate from the
platform which facilitates its use, which is to say that the data files should
be in one area (disk, partition, or major directory) which is wholly separate
from operating system and applications.  It is the data that is unique and
needs to be regularly backed up to be recoverable: the operating system and
applications are reinstallable things.

With that perspective, the TSM Archive system is the appropriate tool to
make long-term images of your organizational data - the kind of imaging which
may be required by regulators or the like.  And you need to perform regular
backups of the continually changing, daily business data.

Disaster recovery is facilitated by TSM DRM and/or other BMR methods, which
allows recovery onto equivalent or comparable hardware.  Your recovery plans
may instead involve no presumption upon being able to obtain any given type
of computer, and so you may simply contemplate installing whatever OS and
application levels you can obtain at the time of recovery, and restore your
data thereafter, to be used by that current platform environment.

Don't let end users define IT and business practices: the IT department and
company executives should do that.  IT should define how to best implement
computer technology to facilitate business operation and possible recovery:
IT has the expertise and experience to make it all work.

   Richard Sims