Good Afternoon.

I have a question on backups and how if you mix full backups and
incremental backups the data is stored.

We are running TSM 5.2.2 on all our TSM clients(AIX, SUN, Windows 2000,
windows 2003), and the server is AIX 5.2 with TSM 5.2.2.

We normally just run incremental for all our machines and over the years
the data gets scattered every where(number of tapes and in some cases
30+) so restores can be very slow.  We keep all our data for 90 days so
with the incremental backups the files expire after  90 days if the file
has been backed up(90 day policy/keep up to 90 backups).  My question is
if I want to do a full backup every 120 days just to better organize my
data on less tapes(current data) does it effect the incremental data
that is on tape in any way?    Does TSM see the backups including a full
backup as files and they expire after a given amount of time?

>From what I could find that is the case but I do not want to mess up
years of data and the users were asking lots of questions on how it
might affect them.  They would be happy with the possibility of faster
restores.

Another question came up, is there any way to have TSM organize data
already on tape for a specific server so it's on a few tapes instead of
spread across many tapes?  Just seeing if we could better manage our
data.


Thanks

Eric Jones