RE: Preventative Maintenance For AS400

["Lopez, Andrew" <alopez@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> A vast majority of IFS usage is in one of a few areas:
> - Domino
> - TSM
> - IXS cards and a Linux partition.
> Any attempt to do what you did would require thousands of dollars of
> manpower to save hundreds of dollars of disk.

I think I'm right about cleaning the items out, but not to "save hundreds
of dollars of disk".  What gets ridiculous is to save
"\\Finance\Statements\1995" and subdirectories every single night from
here to eternity.  Nothing changes, it's never needed and we're burning
availability time because we need another backup of it.  The backup from
last year end would be fine.  Heck, the backup from year end 1996 would
have been fine.

Leaving stuff like this out there just encourages more of the same
behaviour:  users through data into directories with no strategy, I/S buys
more and more DASD, bigger and faster tape drives, while 2/3 of it is
garbage and or redundant.  That wouldn't be that big of an issue, but is
the I/S department still "responsible" for backing it all up?  Still
making full weekly backups?  Still doing nightly differential backups from
the PC side because you can't make differentials from the AS/400 side?

Maybe I'm nuts.  Certainly had made bed choices before, certainly will
again.  But I hate going through mindless work.  I far as I could tell,
and at the end we could tell pretty well, two thirds of the data being
backed up every night was data that was never going to change, two thirds
of the reports being run on a daily basis were never being printed or
used, two thirds of the monthend reports were ignored, and in the meantime
we're wondering why we don't have much time to get anything done.....