That's a curious question, and an interesting idea. I see the advantages of "set it and forget it" with replication, let it catch up on its own, without manual intervention.
But I'm also wondering *why* your export/import is sooooo slow. No inherent reason it should be. I'm assuming your portable TSM server just has a really big disk to hold all the data from the remote client? Do you start multiple exports? If you start multiple filespaces concurrently you should be able to run at the full bandwidth available between your portable and home TSM server, on your in-house network. If that's not happening, I wonder if the problem could be the disk speed on the portable server, or the NIC is already too busy on your home server. If the problem is a resource bottleneck, then you'll have the same problem with either replication or export/import. Also, if your portable TSM server has enough disk to hold all the data from the remote client, Have you ever tried just copying the data wholesale to the disk, with drag&drop or xcopy? (assuming Windows here as an example). Then bring it back, do the first back up in house, rename filespaces on the server end as needed. W We just started a project around consolidated backup of WAN-connected branch offices to a central TSM server. As always distant nodes, the first problem to cope with is how to get the first full backup of the node without waiting for days, weeks or months. We usually do that by sending a small TSM server to the branch office, do a first full backup, send it back to HQ and import the node(s) to the production TSM server. However, export/import is sooo ridiculously slow so the export often takes days. So we have discussed upgrading the temp server to v6.3.4 and use node replication to "copy" the nodes. Lots of advantages, it can be put in a set-and-forget configuration until the nodes are fully replicated so switching the nodes to the prod server is pretty easy, but how fast is node replication actually? Is node replication faster or slower than exports in a setup like this? Any thoughts or real-life experience? - Bent
