Backups rules (was unattended ontape)

Guys and gals, I want to try to produce some really good advice to ex SE customers on what they should do about archiving. Some of them really have their heads in the sand(or elsewhere) and have only purchased one tape drive. They also want to do overnight (unattended?) backups. I am thinking about suggesting the following:- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- if the volume of dbspace is less than 75% of the available tape size then use ontape otherwise use onbar and ism. do an unattended level-0 every night. Next morning check that the ontape or onbar has completed satisfactorily and label the tape accordingly. After the level-0 has completed successfully run ontape -a (or equivalent onbar) to back up the logs for the previous day, but in attended mode. Use new tapes every time. It is not worth saving pounds, dollars, euros, or whatever by recycling tapes. Once per month do a full system restore to a disaster recovery site - to check the integrity of the tapes and the procedures. If necessary, if there are no errors from the disaster recovery exercise it might be possible to reuse some old tapes (>3 months?) if they really are that penny-pinching. And be prepared to use the disaster recovery site to rebuild the critical dbspaces and individual dbspaces in the event that some person accidentally deletes the last 2 years info, or a business process requires the reprint of paperwork based on the database contents three months previous. And I won't guarantee that this is foolproof. But it might give me less headaches than I've had in the last month from 4 sites who have been badly advised about archiving. I even saw a comment to the effect that customers are reticent to perform the administrative work to maintain tape libraries. And that was from a respected computer specialist. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I appreciate that some of my grammar might be wrong, and if I've offended anybody by my ideas then I apologise now. But I would like some constructive criticism of this idea. Who knows, it might even be worthy of inclusion in the FAQ. regards Malcolm