Gordon J. Mills III wrote:
> Josef, here are some of my comments about TSM that I sent to a lister off
> list. I think in a later email I will try to list the things that I liked
> about TSM that I would like to see in Amanda. Some may not be possible.
> 
> At my previous job we used TSM and it is a very nice backup solution. We had
> a tape library that held about 250 tapes and up to 8 drives (We had 5 drives
> in it). It seems to excel at backing up large amounts of data. One unique
> thing it does is that it uses and "incremental forever" backup strategy. It
> backs up a machine fully only once (it can probably be setup other ways, but
> that's the way we used it)<--(I could be wrong about that). There is a
> backup server (similar to the way Amanda is setup) and it has a database
> that keeps track of everything that has been backed up (all files). It knows
> what files are on what tapes (Also similar to Amanda). 
> 

One possible downside of the TSM approach is this database.  If it
is somehow lost or corrupted, all you have is a bunch of tapes with
random chunks of data that may not be recoverable into its original
structure.  While it is a robust database, things can happen (such
as failing RAID or SAN controllers wiping out all of your redundant
disks), so you need to make sure that you have backups of the database
that are outside of TSM (somewhat similar to what can happen if you
lose your Amanda indexes, except that with Amanda you can use native
tools to restore everything on your tapes.

Frank


-- 
Frank Smith                                      fsmith AT hoovers DOT com
Sr. Systems Administrator                       Voice: 512-374-4673
Hoover's Online                                   Fax: 512-374-4501