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 ===============================================================================