I have use Veritas NetBackup and we use Veritas BackupEXEC at this site too. --------------------------
1) Customer has already been using other backup software/method such as Veritas or Legato or tar or cpio. Can anyone share their experience with me ? I know one of the ways is to install TSM on the same client and start the parallel run. Then slowly migrate to TSM. But the drawback is the client may not be able to afford two backup agents running concurrently. Yep, the good thing is after TSMs first backup, the use is pretty light compared to other methods with fulls and Incrementals or Differentials. The trade off is dependence on the TSM database. TSM makes good use of its tape drives, where the direct to tape systems, must have tape drives available during the backup period. NetBackup uses a neat multiplexing method to put data on tape, and TSM also mixes the data that is put on tape, but this is after it is typically when writing from its disk pool. Amanda uses a disk pool o hold fulls and incrementals or differentials till you send it off to tape. I did help with using Legato, and it seems like more of a competitor head to head with NetBackup rather than TSM. BackupEXEC is a little brother of NetBackup (not literally, but in a marketing kind of way). It is another full/diff/incremental kind of backup scheme. I think NetBackup and BackupEXEC both have an option to use a disk pool to backup to, but I have not had the opportunity to use this feature and I don't know how it could be worked into the backup scenario. I think then they would be a little more like Amanda when used, but that is my speculation. 2) Customers have some archive tapes that were backup using other backup software, e.g. financial data that need to be kept for 7 years. How to make TSM able to read these tapes and restore them ? I know we can suggest customers to restore the tapes first and then use TSM to backup. But is there any other ways beside this one ? Customer may not have sufficient system resource to restore and backup the data. My suggestion is to either 1) keep the old system for 7 year is few restores need to be made (my preferred if it is a LOT of data), or 2) restore and re-archive using TSM with appropriate archive length times. Another option is to do a short term lease on equipment to do (2). Just some thoughts. ... Jack