I have a few answers.

1.  Looking at expiration and seeing that it expired "1 backup object" does
not necessarily mean it expired 1 file on your client node.  The way TSM
aggregates files etc. (I won't go into details, mainly as I don't know the
fine details), makes it an abstraction as to the number of objects expired
and the number of files on your client expired.

2.  It you have a file test.txt and it has been backed up, then you rename
the file test.bat, then that is a new file to backup and the old file doesn't
exist anymore as designed by TSM functionality.  The old one should stay
inactive for the period specified by your management class.  TSM doesn't
"know" that you renamed it.  As far as it can determine you deleted the old
file and created a new one.

David Longo

>>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] 03/05/02 10:59AM >>>
Agreed, my concern is why the retain only did not kick in at the time the files was 
renamed to .avb. Is tsm really not recognizing a change in the file even though its' 
type changed? I have displayed active and inactive versions for these files and it is 
as if the .exe version never existed. I have also looked at the expire inventory and 
it shows only 1 file being expired for the entire server. I know of at least 18 on 
this particular server that are in the same situation. So it doesn't seem to have 
expired the .exe version of the files.

Cory

>>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] 03/05/02 10:47AM >>>
It seems to me that this was a very rare situation! As you stated, TSM would
not have changed the extension on the file from .exe to .avb, that was the
anti-virus software or virus itself. Since this file did not change in 33
days this was the only file, which was **ACTIVE** since Nov. 29th, 2001.
Thirty-three days passed by WITHOUT the file changing (Dec 31st, 2001).

So, if this file is changed any point after Dec 31st, it will become
INACTIVE & be flagged for expiration after the next incremental backup. If
expiration has already been run (typically it has if it runs daily) the now
INACTIVE copy hqb.exe will drop off and this file (corrupted) hqb.avb will
be ACTIVE for 33 days (beginning March 2nd,2002) until it is changed!


The only thing that could've gotten you out of this situation was a longer
"Retain Extra Versions"!

Only my thoughts!!!!!

Regards,

Demetrius Malbrough
UNIX/TSM Administrator


-----Original Message-----
From: Cory Heikel [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] 
Sent: Tuesday, March 05, 2002 9:04 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
Subject: Urgent question: Version retention


We were hit by the klez virus over the weekend. In trying to restore some
files from pre infected state I found what appears to be a fatal flaw in the
way I have versioning set up (or a "feature" in tsm). We are running win/nt
4.0 sp6a and tsm 4.2.1 client, the server is on aix and also 4.2.1. These
are the parms I am using.


Versions Data Exists     NOLIMIT
Versions Data Deleted  2
Retain Extra Versions   33
Retain Only Version     365
Copy Mode                  MODIFIED
Copy Serialization        SHRSTATIC
Copy Frequency          0

The idea was to be able to keep up to the last 33 days of changes to any
given file. What happened is this - when our virus program detected the
virus it renamed the files from .exe to .avb. Tivoli, it appears, did not
make a distinction between the files and just backed up the new .avb file as
a newer version of the .exe file. Since the .exe had not been changed since
the end of November, the only good backup of that file was dropped because
it was over 33 days old.  I believe that this is what is occurring because
when I look at the file details for these files (on the restore screen) I
see this:

Name         Size     Modified     Created     Backed up
hqd.avb    98 kb  29-nov-01   02-mar-02  03-mar-02

Note that the create date is more than 3 months later than the modified
date. My questions are:

1. does this sound like a bug in tsm?

2. is it more likely a problem in the way the anti-virus software is
renaming the file?

3. Is there any was to tell tivoli to keep a certain minimum number of
versions, something along the lines of a RETAIN MINIMUM VERSIONS so that
both high and low water marks and be kept for any given copygroup?

Your help is greatly appreciated.

Cory Heikel
Sr. Systems engineer
Milton S. Hershey Medical Center
(717) 531-7972


"MMS <health-first.org>" made the following
 annotations on 03/05/02 12:19:07
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