What you are saying Sean makes perfect sense and I couldn't agree more but the big issue anyone trying this faces at the moment is the time it will take to do this operation. If you only have a very small system say < 1TB with not too much in the way of small fies then it would be very feasable. Unfortunately for us, we are talking about 70-80TB of data with 100million+ files... To do an export server would probably take months!
I think we are going to stick to our original plan of just exporting the necessary production servers using the filedata=backupactive option. There is one minor gotcha here though, that on our unix TSM clients this works fine and gives realistic figures but on a lot of our Wintel tsm clients the preview says there is a couple of hundred bytes that would be exported, when I know full well there are GB's of active data. Has anyone else experienced this issue? Many thanks Andy Wilcox UNIX Systems Administrator Aquila Networks -----Original Message----- From: tsmadmin account for Excaliber Business Solutions [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 09 January 2004 10:41 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Taking an end-of-year snapshot Importance: High Hi Have you had a look at the EXPORT SERVER command. This could help you and you can keep your data as long as you want to. The only problem will be your hardware when you want to recover your data in 4 to 10 years time, because by that time most current hardware will be out of date or depending on how often your company changes the hardware. You could try maybe before you upgrade your hardware import the data back to a different server and then re-export the data to the new hardware until the data is expired. Do this process every 2 to 3 years depending how often you change your hardware. I am aware this is time consuming, but this is the only way you would be able to recover the business data say in 5 years time with new hardware. One more assumption data backed up to a tape/cart for such a long time of 10 years and not being recycled could also be a problem as the cart/tape will pick up dust or the offsite company does not look after your tape/cart as well as they should. This will be a problem when to try to restore the data, you may find yourself with a lot of tape errors. By doing the import command as stated above you could find that when you want to restore the data you do not have any cart/tapes errors. Thks Sean -----Original Message----- From: Mark Ferraretto [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, January 09, 2004 11:59 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Taking an end-of-year snapshot Andy/Chaps, Well, it looks like what we're going to do is set up a separate TSM instance and have it share the tape library. Then we will copy our onsite pool from the main instance to this other instance. After the copy we run a PREPARE, eject the tapes, shut the thing down, send it off site and then remove it from the server. It's a modification of Steve Harris's idea but separating it into a separate instance means that we don't have to recover the entire TSM server just to recover year-end data. We have to make sure the copies are complete by the end of the month as the backup data has a 32 day expiration set (although we could change this if we get into trouble but then we have more data to copy). So, to summarise: * create a new tsm instance * have it share the library * export the data from our primary pool to the new instance's primary pool * backup the db * run PREPARE on the new instance * eject all the tapes * gift-wrap and send offsite * shut down and remove the instance from the server To restore, we would need to do this: * recall the dr plan and tapes from offsite * reconstruct the new instance * restore This is what we're working on now. It's not nice - too much data is copied across - but at least we get everything that we need to get. Mark -- Mark Ferraretto Unix Systems Administrator - Unix support hotline: +852 2203 6369 Deutsche Bank Hong Kong w: +852 2203 6362 m: +852 9558 8032 f: +852 2203 6971 [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent by: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 08/01/2004 23:21 Please respond to ADSM-L To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] cc: Subject: Re: Taking an end-of-year snapshot This isn't exactly a solution but I have the very same problem as yourself in finding the best way of doing this, and as you have pointed out, there is no easy way that we have found. It is lookin very much like we will have to make our TSM service unavailable for a "long-weekend" to be able to carry out the snapshots. How have you got on with your snapshot Mark? Have you found any gotchas worth sharing? Has anyone else had to overcome this issue and found a less disruptive way of doing it? Many thanks Andy Wilcox UNIX Systems Administrator Aquila Networks -----Original Message----- From: Mark Ferraretto [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 06 January 2004 03:59 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Taking an end-of-year snapshot All, We are running TSM 5.1.6.1 on AIX 5.1 What I want to do is to take an snapshot of our TSM data as it was at end of year 1/1/04 and archive it away for 10 years. Is this possible? I haven't found a way of doing it. We need to make an end-of-year archive each year for legal etc purposes. Running an archive of everything on one day doesn't seem practical - too much data coming into the server. But snapshotting the existing backup data would be ideal. I was thinking that I could generate a backup set and backdate the snapshot the backup set would take but there doesn't seem to be an option to do this. Does anyone know how this can be done? 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