Archiving The Actlog

I just had a friend e-mail me and state he was being contacted by his previous employer complaining he made changes to their TSM retention times causing them to lose data. The TSM admin who took over is blaming him stating he changed the retention and now the data is gone. My friend does not remember making any retention changes and the problem is that any change to the copygroup updates the "Last Update by (administrator)" and the "Last Update Date/Time" so it's not substantial evidence of who did what. The only way to verify what had really occurred would be to either keep the actlog for an extremely long period of time, or dump it to a text file that you zip and archive. (Even then it's a text file and could be tampered with) In the case of my friend, he left the company last November and anyone could have altered the copygroup since then.

How many of you archive your TSM Activity Log, and how long do you keep it for? Obviously it good for security and tracking purposes, but who manages it and can you reliably keep it in a read-only state? Of course this is also a case where a bi-monthly audit of retention settings would have helped.

New TSM Management Tool

I have been informed of a new TSM management tool called TSM Studio. It looks pretty slick, but I won't lie, I haven't had a chance to use it yet. If you are looking for a TSM tool check it out. I plan on posting a quick overview of all the TSM tools in the near future. If you have experience with any TSM tool (i.e. TSMManager, TSM Explorer, TSM Studio, AutoVault, Servergraph, Aptare, Bocada, or EMC's DPA) and are willing to write up a review of the product, let me know and we'll publish it here for others to use when deciding on a tool for their own environment.

EMC Backup Advisor

I am currently working a project to install and setup EMC Backup Advisor in our environment. If anyone has experience with the product I'd like to hear your thoughts and opinions. So far it seems like it can monitor almost anything. Hopefully it doesn't become such a huge/complex tool that we'll spend half our time trying to manage it.