I'm considering changing the way I do my TSM DB backups; I've heard some user experiences about backing up to remote server volumes, and it appears that this would simplify a lot of work, and save oodles of space.
Here's how I've got it sketched in my mind right now: A server instance whose sole purpose is to store backup volumes. Disk sufficient to hold a day's fulls from all my other servers. Tapes. (perhaps two or three copy pools?) Each other server runs a full every day, I make N copies of them, and shunt them off to tapes. The "TSM DB Backup Server" ends up hosting a few thousand files at most. A full backup of that database is microscopic; megabytes. I make one every day to a FILE device class. The directory in which that FILE devclass is stored gets rsynced all the *#&@ over the place on an hourly basis (overkill: it gets written to once a day. But who cares? it's a directory with a few dozen 10MB files in it.) This way I avoid using N 3590 tapes (where N is my number of servers, and certainly > 4 ) every day when I'm writing a -total- of well under 20GB of compressed data. Opinions? Gaping holes I've missed? - Allen S. Rout
