Customizing policies

An organization's goals for how data is protected and retained are typically defined by corporate executives, legal advisors, or other people in lead roles. Policies are the means to align the operation of IBM® Tivoli® Storage Manager with the data protection and retention goals of your organization.

About this task

To automatically manage data protection and retention, you define policies, which are rules that you set on the server. Policies affect how much data is stored over time, and how long data is retained and available for clients to restore. Customize policies to meet the data protection goals for your organization.

You choose the policy that manages a client's data by assigning the client to a policy domain. Clients of different types have different retention requirements, and customizing and creating policies is typically necessary.

When a server is installed, by default it has one policy, in one policy domain. You can customize that policy and create your own policy.

  • Policy concepts
    The policy for a specific client is determined by the settings in the policy domain to which a client is added.
  • Customizing a policy
    You can customize existing policies to meet new or revised data retention requirements for your organization. Modifying a policy domain or copying an existing policy domain is a typical way to start customizing policy.
  • Creating a policy by copying an existing policy
    You can create new policies by copying an existing policy and then updating the parts that you want to change.
  • Creating a policy domain
    You might want to create a new policy domain for each type of client that is protected by the server. You might also want to divide responsibilities for clients among several administrators by giving them authority for specific policy domains.
  • Controlling client operations through client option sets
    You can use client option sets to centrally control the processing options that clients use for operations such as backup. Client option sets can help ensure that data is consistently protected according to your requirements. A client option set can override options in a local client options file, and can add options that might not be in a local client options file.