I have received some helpful information both on and off list, which I
very much appreciate, and forwarded some postings to the group that has
to make this happen. I also intend to summarize the suggestions and
repost later. I am also grateful that I don't have to worry about making
sure operations and administration happen every day (been there, done
it, dialed in from home every work day morning and on major holidays,
and have stories to tell), but only interject myself into the daily
goings on issues like this.

I doubt that changing the offsite backup site will "fly", and even if we
told them to, they would likely hold us responsible for anything that
went awry because we deviated from the standard DR plan, and they would
probably be right. We need to ask them for more, not less, and that
means continuing to ship our tapes (with plenty of other tapes from lots
of systems) off site for the requisite years of storage. As best as I
can figure, since we want to be able to quickly recover any file since
the last full backup (or maybe two full backups) without requesting a
retrieval, that means keeping a small set of duplicates on site. This
means either copying tapes, or storing twice. But then, if I were sure
of this, I wouldn't have asked for comments and suggestions.

Currently, we backup the system volume set, and some incidental private
volume sets, once a week, and perform daily differentials in between. We
have two production volume sets, which are fully backed up, every day.
This is in part due to the recent traffic on the relative reliability of
120MB DAT. We have not ruled backing these up to disc with some form of
compression, but the amount of data has been growing relatively rapidly;
I have seen some datasets double in size in just over a month. I don't
know if this is tenable in long run, although the rate of growth and
data aging off * might * stabilize, unless it doesn't.

I am surprised no one mentioned verifying the tapes... Again, comments
and suggestions welcome.