Support for CDP Persistent Storage Manager

Persistent Storage Manager (PSM) is the snapshot technology that is included with a number of Microsoft Server Appliance Kit-based NAS boxes that include the IBM® TotalStorage NAS 200, 300, and 300G.

You can use the backup-archive client to back up the persistent images (PI) of a volume that is produced by PSM. You must first ensure that the volume has a label. You can then use PSM to schedule or create a persistent image with a specific image name, such as snapshot.daily, and set the number of images to save to 1. PSM overwrites the PI as needed and you can use the client to incrementally back up the PI. In this case, the client backs up only the files that changed between snapshots. One advantage of backing up a PSM PI rather than the actual volume, is that there are no open files in the PI.

Consider the following items before you use Persistent Storage Manager:

• By default, a PSM schedule uses a variable name (snapshot.%i) and keeps a number of images.
  Important: Do not use the client with PSM in this manner. The client considers each image as unique and makes a complete copy of each image.
• The client requires that the volume used to make the PI has a label. If the volume does not have a label, the client does not back up its PI.
• You use the image backup function to back up the original volume that is used to create the PI. However, you cannot use the backup image function to back up the PI.
• To avoid backing up unnecessary files when you back up PSM, include the following entries in your client option file (dsm.opt):

  exclude.dir "Persistent Storage Manager State"
  exclude.file "*.psm"
  exclude.file "*.otm"