Matt, We do a full backup once a week and incrementals every other day. Our full backups take about 2 hours and the incrementals only take an hour or less depending on the activity for that day. If you don't save any time by doing the incrementals then you are better off doing fulls. It takes less time to restore the database from a full than using incrementals. When we first started using incrementals I had it set up to do 30 incrementals and then a full. Wouldn't you know on day 29 we lost the database and I had to restore using 30 tapes. That's when I changed it to weekly. Jim Sporer
At 10:49 AM 3/13/2003 -0500, you wrote:
I'm curious about the type and frequency of database backups that people do. I've inherited a TSM environment set up by sombeody else and I'm trying to make sense out of it.
The original setup did two backups every day, a full and a snapshot. The full stayed onsite and the snapshot went offsite. (We use DRM, and the MOVE DRM * SOURCE=DBS sent the snapshot offsite and left the full alone). That seemed like overkill, so I changed the "onsite" backup to do a full backup on Sunday and an incremental other days. But at two hours for a full backup, and almost as long for an incremental, I'm wondering if we're still spending more time than necessary backing up our database. Does anybody else see the need for two daily backups? I think the likeliihood of a disaster requiring a database restore is so slim that a single offsite copy might be enough, especially since our "offsite vault" is less than a 5-minute walk (which raises another issue, but thats what we're living with).
Does anybody mess with full/incremental database backups? Or, if I'm only going to do one backup a day, would it make more sense to do a full every day, to simplify things if I do have a disaster and need to restore? --
Matt Simpson -- OS/390 Support 219 McVey Hall -- (859) 257-2900 x300 University Of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506 <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> mainframe -- An obsolete device still used by thousands of obsolete companies serving billions of obsolete customers and making huge obsolete profits for their obsolete shareholders. And this year's run twice as fast as last year's.
