>We tried going direct-to-tape with our LTO. That worked OK on Domino and >Oracle, but it was terrible on file servers.
The underlying problem with file system backup and drives with mediocre start-stop performance is in the "sputtering" way that Backup will send files as it encounters them in traversing the file system. Enlarged transaction buffering will help with this. A frontal disk storage pool, as many have suggested, also does the trick. A more labor-intensive method would be to have a non-TSM (i.e., home-grown) tool run through the file system to collect the names of all the candidate files and then initiate a backup with the -FILEList option, to in effect cause streaming, eliminating all the time gaps in candidate discovery. It's a more desperate measure, but it may suit some installations. Richard Sims, BU "Think different." - Apple