There is a good reason it keeps coming up: legitimate business requirements.
The suits (auditors, IRS, corp counsel, HIPAA, etc) demand to be able to be able to reproduce any datum at given intervals for given durations. Most often, that translates to restoring files that may change every day to "month end" state for somewhere between 1 and 7 years. Sometime they can identify the kinds of data they want, but it is expensive to accurately identify the list of all files/directories required, so usually you get a vague wave to "save everything". And of course, it's their data, not yours, they have a right to keep as much as they want. Telling them that TSM doesn't support their requirement just invites other software vendors in the door since *they* handle this particular requirement with ease (on paper). The number of days you can reasonably keep in an incremental backup usually doesn't extend to forever. Archives sometimes don't cut it, either in their traditional form or the instant form. You can't stand to move that much data or use that many tapes - that's why you went incremental forever in the first place. I really just to do some operation that marks the current active version with a longer guaranteed retention, without changing the retention of anything else. I don't want to restart the perennial discussion of truly long term archival storage. It's reasonable to expect a backup system to maintain internal compatibility for 7 years, and there are techniques for migrating the data to newer media. Just my 5 cents worth (inflation). _____________________________ William Mansfield Senior Consultant Solution Technology, Inc "Mr. Lindsay Morris" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent by: "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 04/04/2002 10:04 AM Please respond to lmorris To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] cc: Subject: Re: Monthly Backups, ...again! This keeps coming up. It's the hardest thing about TSM, to sell users on the way it works. Tivoli's Storage Vision whitepaper has a comparison of the benefits you get by NOT using this Grandfather-father-son technique, but I wish somebody at Tivoli would come up with some better assistance to help us sell the incremental-forever -ooops, progressive backup methodolgy - to non-techie users. (Maybe it's there and I just don't know where to find it...?) I think Kelly Lipp has a good article on archiving and when it's sensible - maybe he'll post that link here again. Also, maybe some users have specific oddball scenarios they have run into that require surprising policy settings. It would be interesting to hear about those. Like, the user who goes on vacation for two weeks, and manages to trash here email file the day she leaves, doesn't notice it, Lotus touches the damaged file every day so it gets backed up again, and they don't keep 14 versions, so she gets back and the only good version (15 days old) has rolled off (expired). --------------------------------- Mr. Lindsay Morris CEO, Servergraph www.servergraph.com 859-253-8000 ofc 425-988-8478 fax > -----Original Message----- > From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of > Marc Levitan > Sent: Thursday, April 04, 2002 8:51 AM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: Monthly Backups, ...again! > > > A question was brought up while discussing retention policies. > > Currently we have the following retentions: > > Policy Policy Mgmt Copy Versions Versions Retain Retain > Domain Set Name Class Group Data Data Extra Only > Name Name Name Exists Deleted Versions Version > --------- --------- --------- --------- -------- -------- -------- ------- > COLD ACTIVE COLD STANDARD 2 1 5 30 > > NOVELL ACTIVE DIRMC STANDARD 30 1 120 365 > NOVELL ACTIVE STANDARD STANDARD 30 1 120 365 > > RECON ACTIVE DIRMC STANDARD 36 3 75 385 > RECON ACTIVE MC_RECON STANDARD 26 1 60 365 > > STANDARD ACTIVE DIRMC STANDARD 26 1 60 365 > STANDARD ACTIVE STANDARD STANDARD 26 1 60 365 > > > UNIX ACTIVE MC_UNIX STANDARD 30 1 60 30 > > > I believe that this provides for daily backups for over a month. > > There was a request to have the following: > 1) Daily backups for a week. > 2) Weekly backups for a month. > 3) Monthly backups for a year. > > I believe we are providing 1 & 2. We are providing daily backups for a > month. > > How can I provide monthly backups for a year? > I know that I could take monthly archives, but this would exceed > our backup > windows and would increase our resources ( db, tapes, etc.) > Also, I know we could lengthen our retention policies. > Also we could create backup sets. (tons of tapes!) > > How are other people handling this? > > Thanks, > > > Marc Levitan > Storage Manager > PFPC Global Fund Services > _____________________________ William Mansfield Senior Consultant Solution Technology, Inc