Hi All,

        I've just joined this group and I am pleased to see a lot of
healthy discussion going on.  The main reason I joined the group has to
do with trying to find some way to help out the people who are
responsible for dealing with Tivoli Storage Manager at a neighboring
agency.  I represent a State agency in Louisiana.  We do a lot of large
applications for Statewide users as well as departmental support.  We do
not have to deal with the H/W  and OS issues.  That's someone else's
job.  That also means that they are responsible for the backup and
recovery procedures for our application servers.  That's where Tivoli
and you guys come in.

        My problem is that they (that sister agency) do not seem to have
a reliable way of verifying that all backups have been properly
completed.  They don't even seem to have a way to know that all files
(that need to be backed up) are being backed up.  I've seen the reports
that get generated during the backup process and I am definitely
unimpressed.  Backups start and backups complete.  There doesn't seem to
be anything that says how many rows are copied or how large the files
are or anything else that could be used for verifying the accuracy of
the backups.  They tell my folks that we should trust Tivoli is doing
the job correctly.  Trust is the problem....

        We have needed to have restores done on just a few databases in
the past and the restores were not complete and up to date.  In each
case we were able to rebuild the data using logs maintained within the
applications but that should not have been necessary.  Each recovery was
done at a point after a backup and before additional processing had been
done within the apps so they should have been complete.  In each case,
the folks who run Tivoli for us were able to track down and show that
problems had occurred during the processing of the backups.  They did
this through circumstantial evidence and in each case once again said
that they have no way of verifying that the backups are actually good.
I hear a lot about the difficulty of trying to write a program to
process the Tivoli log files.

        I think I'm at wit's end with these folks and the product.  I
know that the people are competent and I suspect that the product (like
other things available from IBM) really is weak on the reporting and
verification issue.  I'm hoping that someone out there in the Big Wide
World has already solved this problem with an in-house or third-party
solution.  Sorry for being so long winded.  Any ideas...?

Wesley Smith