>> On Wed, 7 Apr 2010 00:16:54 -0400, Steve Harris <[email protected]> >> said:
> I have a customer that thinks he wants a monthly backup kept > forever: cites legislative requirements and will not be disuaded. > Current implementation is to use a series of backupsets. We have several units which have spent some time thinking they must do something like this. You might be able to improve this by setting up a distinct policy domain (or heck, even server instance). So far, they've all eventually repented the decision, but what we did was: For customer EXAMPLE, we define two policy domains: EXAMPLE, with vere=7,verdel=5,retextra=60,retonly=90 EXAMPLE-LONGTERM, with vere=nolimit,verdel=nolimit,retextra=nolimit,retonly=nolimit Are you shuddering? Good. then they define two TSM nodes: VICTIM, in domain EXAMPLE. VICTIM-LONGTERM in EXAMPLE-LONGTERM. They schedule VICTIM to back up nightly, and VICTIM-LONGTERM monthly. I give them dire warnings about the possibilities for stupid storage growth with VICTIM-LONGTERM. Pleasantly, we're set up for chargeback; if they really go overboard the customer feels it before I do. You can do the dual schedule in a variety of ways. If you're a pedant you could run two CADs. You could also assign a CMD schedule in domain EXAMPLE to run 'dsmc incr -optfile=/yadda/longterm.opt' and schedule that monthly. Flip a coin as to which of these is less confusing. If you go this way, you will: + Still be using incremental heuristics to calculate the monthly backup. + Take up less duplicate space than the backupsets (or archive, Richard) solution. + Still be able to query the node contents without odd backupset introspection + Be able to manipulate the long-term data with the same media independance as your short-term data. Someone who thinks they need 'indefinite' storage should really really care about that. The backupsets are not, (to my knowledge) transferrable unless you're in virtual volume land. I can just see someone presenting today with a ZIP drive. "This is my permanent record!". You have a ZIP drive on your TSM server, don't you? Pleasantly for your case, it's also plausible that you could set it up in time for "next month", and by "the month after that", you'll already be saving tapes. - Allen S. Rout - Pedant.
