My determination of what the LID (I presume you are talking about the dates in the filespace table) is goes along with what Alex and Andy have said. I use this date only as an indicator that the last incremental backup against that filespace completed. That is what updates the date based on what I have seen. The only time it has not updated is the session dropped through the middle of the backup because of a server failure or a client code failure. I actually run a select comparing the begin and end dates so I can catch the problems.
I would be very careful to not make any other determinations from those dates in the filespace records. When I first started with TSM about a year ago, this area was the most confusing mess of documentation I have every seen. It even led you to believe that you could specify a partial incremental with a management class that said absolute. I could never understand why the filespace backed up entirely. It was because the documentation was wrong. The INCREMENTAL command should have been obsoleted years ago with only a compatibility and a new set of commands FULLBACKUP, UPDATEFULLBACKUP, and PARTIALLYUPDATEFULLBACKUP put in its place so that customers would not be so darn confused. The terminology incremental is just flat confusing. I spend so much time explaining it to new users it is ridiculous. There have been sales of TSM lost because of this confusion. At least if they divided it up into these three commands they may be able to reduce the confusion as to what happens during the process. Such as, filespace dates updates, expiration processing invoked, etc. Right now it is like reading a contract with ultra fine print. Maybe an act of Congress to require the fine print be written in laymen's terms would be in order. The best test to see if they have fixed the confusion is to take 20 college graduates, give them the documentation and 2 hours to complete a script of backups/restores that would normally take 1 hour. If they cannot figure it out, in 2 hours the documentation is not documentation. Even the GUI is confusing on what a partial or full incremental is. I have seasoned 25 year professionals that cannot understand what the heck is being talked about. I hope this clears the confusion up. I am still confused. Paul D. Seay, Jr. Technical Specialist Naptheon Inc. 757-688-8180 -----Original Message----- From: Alex Paschal [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Monday, August 12, 2002 7:30 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Incremental Backup (full/partial) Ah, look, Mark, I really hate to do this, because it's making me look like a horse's hind end for not being graceful about this subject, but just now I did a... dsmc inc -incrbydate / and it updated the Last Backup Completion Date (LID) in a "query filespace f=d" for the / filespace. LID doesn't tell you whether you're doing Partials or Fulls. The fact of the matter is LID has nothing to do with Partial backups. Look, I'm not trying to attack you, I'm not trying to prove you're wrong or I'm right, and, believe it or not, I'm not trying to nitpick semantics. I'm just saying that misleading terminology or terminology used in a misleading way can mislead those who are new to TSM, haven't taking your class, and are looking to this mailing list for help and education. Specifically, in this case, the thread starter, Ken Horacek, who at this point doesn't know whether to use the book's terminology or yours to answer the question he has about what he read in the book. Alex Paschal Storage Administrator Freightliner, LLC (503) 745-6850 phone/vmail -----Original Message----- From: Mark D. Rodriguez [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Monday, August 12, 2002 3:16 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Incremental Backup (full/partial) Alex, I have read through your response and I can understand your position. However, firat I would like to point out that the TSM documentation is not always clear and is not always consistant. The text you quoted from the Admin Guide is an example of them not being consistant. Clearly what they are describing there is a "incremental -incrbydate" type backup. And as I stated earlier you can consider it a "partial incremental", but that does not mean that a "partial incremental is only acheived by "incremental -incrbydate", that's like saying "I live in Texas therefore I am a Texan and an American" based on that fact I can say all Texan's are Americans, but not all Americans are Texans. I will concede that there is places within the documentation that refers to the "-incrbydate" option as beeing a "partial backup" and I can show you IBM/Tivoli education material that describes a partial exactly as I did in my note. But rather than nit picking the symantics I would like to re-phrase my explanation, Instead of calling it "full incremental" and "partial incremental" maybe we should use full and non-full. The key here is what happens when you don't use "full incrementals", in particular the Last Incremental Date ( what I refer to as the LID) does not get updated. This is a critical peice of information. Much of the documentations explanation for other processes are assumming that you are doing fulls since it keys off of the LID. In addition, what other processing is being effected by your "non-full incremental" (filespec limited or -incrbydate option), i.e. file expiration, rebinding, missed files etc. The point that I am really trying to make is you should always be doing full incremental backups! The only time to consider anything else is if there is a severe time constraint on the backup window. I think this thread has been great. It has given people a look at how, what and why TSM is doing what it does. -- Regards, Mark D. Rodriguez President MDR Consulting, Inc. ============================================================================ === MDR Consulting The very best in Technical Training and Consulting. IBM Advanced Business Partner SAIR Linux and GNU Authorized Center for Education IBM Certified Advanced Technical Expert, CATE AIX Support and Performance Tuning, RS6000 SP, TSM/ADSM and Linux Red Hat Certified Engineer, RHCE ============================================================================ ===
