What kind of shelf life are you expecting for your media? Since they've discovered that optical has data decay, it's not even "forever"! I've seen some others on the list point at it, but how will you restore this data in 10 years?
Here's what I'd look at doing: 1. Take about 5 dbbackups (or snapshots) and send them to the vault. Take a few OS level backups of your server (bootable tape images). Send them, too. Send volhist, devconfig, a prepare file, TSM server and client code, OS install code, everything else that makes your environment your environment, including the clients, offsite. This is DR - in the most extreme sense of the term. 2. Box up the vault. Seal the boxes, leave them there. 3. Start marking offsite volumes as destroyed (or just delete them) in TSM, and run more Backup Stgpools. They'll run longer, as you're recreating the old tapes. 4. Go back to step 1 and repeat once. If this data is really that important to have forever, make sure you can get it back! 5. Start sleeping - you're going to be WAY behind on that! Now, for the people making the requirement - they need to get a contract to have accessible like hardware to do the restores to. Not just the TSM server and tape library, but the clients, too. Having the data available is one thing, being able to restore it is another. Nick Cassimatis [EMAIL PROTECTED] Today is the tomorrow of yesterday.
