We have the opposite situation - we have fast robotics and use collocation. With collocation on fast tape, it doesn't matter whether you are doing 2 weeks or 2 years of data, a restore takes the same amount of time.
Doing periodic fulls doesn't "refresh" anything, from TSM's point of view - the original backups are still in the TSM DB and still available, even if they are 5 years old. If you do periodic fulls, you have to retransmit everything over the network again, and you have to adjust your policies to make sure you allow those redundant versions to be kept; you increase the size of your DB and the amount of reclaims you have to do. Doing periodic "fulls" would do nothing whatever for us, except bog down the network. I suggest you try doing a large restore to test your own capabilities. If you can't restore in a timely fashion, FIRST figure out what your bottleneck is before you decide to "fix" it by doing full backups. Then if you find out you still can't do restores in a timely fashion, at least check out the use of BACKUPSETS. They give you all the client's active data on one tape, without retransmitting all the data, and without creating an extra zillion entries in your DB. -----Original Message----- From: Tim Melly [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Monday, December 17, 2001 10:46 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Incremental forever -- any problems? Adam, We were only doing incrementals and we had a situation where we had to restore a Novell server. The restore had to go through two years worth of incremental tapes to complete the restore. I would strongly recommend doing periodic fulls (and colocation) unless you have a SLA which allows for extremely long restores. Regards, Tim NAFTA IS Technical Operations (203) 812-3469 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Adam J Boyer <adam.j.boyer To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] @FRB.GOV> cc: Sent by: Subject: Incremental forever -- any problems? "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" <[EMAIL PROTECTED] RIST.EDU> 12/17/2001 09:31 AM Please respond to "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" Hey, Our management is wondering if it's safe to just do incrementals forever, or whether we should try to do a forced full every few months to keep things fresh. Our experience has been that the incremental system works great-- we once restored a whole raid 5 array, with many files from years ago. But, nonetheless, I'd appreciate any stories or testaments to help build a case. Thanks much, adam
