Process and Back up a Single Path of an Included File System

Answer

There are several options you can use with the Tivoli Storage Manager client to backup only a single directory in a file system.

Option 1:
In the case of scheduled backups, the easiest thing to do is to define the schedule with these settings:

OBJECTS='M:\DATA\USERS\*'
OPTIONS=-SUBDIR=YES

The drawbacks are:
(a) it does not prevent an end user from manually backing up other directories, and
(b) QUERY FILESPACE will not have useful backup start and end times.


Option 2:

The next easiest option would be to define a share that points to the desired directory, then use DOMAIN to specify the share name, along with other desired objects such as SYSTEMSTATE.

DOMAIN \\mypc\users systemstate

Note that using the GUI you can look under "Network" to see the "users" share is available for backup/restore.


Option 2 , Robust method:

With the Tivoli Storage Manager client, using EXCLUDE.DIR options in the client options file, you can eliminate the processing of unwanted directories. The use of regular expressions (regex) will allow a user to remove unwanted files from processing and backups which will reduce processing time and resource load on the system.

Example:

The C: file system has been included in the domain statement, but only one directory is required to be backed up on this system, C:\data\users\*.

* Without the following two statements, you will get C:\data\users but you will also get files in the root of the C: drive.

exclude *
include "c:\data\users\...\*"

* Exclude all directories that are not C:\data\users.

exclude.dir c:\[a-ce-z0-9]*
exclude.dir c:\d[b-z0-9]*
exclude.dir c:\da[a-su-z0-9]*
exclude.dir c:\dat[b-z0-9]*
exclude.dir c:\d
exclude.dir c:\da
exclude.dir c:\dat
exclude.dir c:\data?*
exclude.dir c:\data\[a-tv-z0-9]*
exclude.dir c:\data\u[a-rt-z0-9]*
exclude.dir c:\data\us[a-df-z0-9]*
exclude.dir c:\data\use[a-qs-z0-9]*
exclude.dir c:\data\user[a-rt-z0-9]*
exclude.dir c:\data\u
exclude.dir c:\data\us
exclude.dir c:\data\use
exclude.dir c:\data\user
exclude.dir c:\data\users?*

* exclude all directories on drives that are not C:.

exclude.dir [a-bd-z]:\*

This ensures that only the desired data would be backed up. It will also allow for proper reporting of backup statistics and estimations while also preventing the user from backing up undesired items during manual non-selective backups.

Most importantly, when the full list is used, it also allows the user to create files, folders and file systems on this client node; even ones with similar names within the data directory, and automatically excludes them with no maintenance from the Tivoli Storage Manager admin or user.