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Administrator's Guide


Chapter 12. Implementing Policies for Client Data

Policies are rules that you set at the Tivoli Storage Manager server to help you manage client data. Policies control how and when client data is stored, for example:

Tivoli Storage Manager provides a standard policy that sets rules to provide a basic amount of protection for data on workstations. If this standard policy meets your needs, you can begin using Tivoli Storage Manager immediately. See Basic Policy Planning for information about the standard policy.

The server process of expiration is one way that the server enforces policies that you define. Expiration processing determines when files are no longer needed, that is, when the files are expired. For example, if you have a policy that requires only four copies of a file be kept, the fifth and oldest copy is expired. During expiration processing, the server removes entries for expired files from the database, effectively deleting the files from server storage. See File Expiration and Expiration Processing and Running Expiration Processing to Delete Expired Files for details.

You may need more flexibility in your policies than the standard policy provides. To accommodate individual user's needs, you may fine tune the STANDARD policy (see Getting Users Started for details), or create your own policies (see Creating Your Own Policies for details). Some types of clients or situations require special policy. For example, you may want to enable clients to restore backed-up files to a specific point in time (see Setting Policy to Enable Point-in-Time Restore for Clients for more information).

Policy can be distributed from a configuration manager to managed servers. See Chapter 20, Working with a Network of Tivoli Storage Manager Servers for more information on distributing configurations.

See the following sections:

Concepts:
"Basic Policy Planning"
"The Standard Policy"
"File Expiration and Expiration Processing"
"Client Operations Controlled by Policy"
"The Parts of a Policy"
"More on Management Classes"
"How Tivoli Storage Manager Selects Files for Policy Operations"
"How Client Migration Works with Backup and Archive"

Tasks:
Getting Users Started
"Changing Policy"
"Creating Your Own Policies"
"Defining and Updating a Policy Domain"
"Defining and Updating a Policy Set"
"Defining and Updating a Management Class"
"Defining and Updating a Backup Copy Group"
"Defining and Updating an Archive Copy Group"
"Assigning a Default Management Class"
"Validating and Activating a Policy Set"
"Assigning Client Nodes to a Policy Domain"
"Running Expiration Processing to Delete Expired Files"
Setting Policy to Enable Point-in-Time Restore for Clients
Policy for Tivoli Storage Manager Servers as Clients
"Configuring Policy for Tivoli Data Protection Application Clients"
Policy for Logical Volume Backups
"Configuring Policy for Managed System for SAN"
"Distributing Policy Using Enterprise Configuration"
"Querying Policy"
"Deleting Policy"

In this chapter, most examples illustrate how to perform tasks by using a Tivoli Storage Manager command-line interface. For information about the commands, see Administrator's Reference, or issue the HELP command from the command line of a Tivoli Storage Manager administrative client.

Tivoli Storage Manager tasks can also be performed from the administrative Web interface. For more information about using the administrative interface, see Quick Start.


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