Tape restore problem primary and copy tape bad

[jlbrsmith]

I have the following situation.

I had a bad tape in the onsite tape pool. I did a restore volume and recovered the 16 tapes I needed to do the restore. When I ran the restore 15 tapes did just fine, but the 16th tape failed and went to unavailable. So now I have the situation of the same files being on 2 tapes, but both are bad. The live data is still on the source server so I could back it up again

I am looking for help on this

thank you

[Harry_Redl]

Hi,

if you are sure both tapes are bad then you should back the file again (use selective backup)
If you back up all the files that are on the bad tapes (use "q cont <volume_name>") and you do not need the old versions, delete those volumes from TSM (use "del vol <volume_name> discard=yes" on the primary volume - copy volume goes along)
It is even possible that the tapes will be deleted automatically (after expiration) as they are now considered empty.
Remove them from library and .. burn them?

Harry

[JohanW]

If you are sure both tapes are bad, you should remove those tapes first. Depending on if it's a primary or copy stgpool tape, you update the status to unavailable or you delete it (read help upd vol - it's in there somewhere). you then restore the tape, after which the unavailable tape goes destroyed I think (this should be in the help for restore vol), and afterwards the next backup should automatically backup any destroyed files again, because there now is no longer a backup of it.

IMHO, you should not have to do anything like q cont <vol_name>; TSM takes care of that if you take care of the tapes.

Before burning, drive a truck over 'em? Just for grins and giggles of course, and the satisfaction of driving a truck over something.

[jlbrsmith]

the issue with the 2 tapes is that one is th eprimary and the other the backup of the primary, so both have the same file information on it

backing up is the way to go, luckily it is about about 800 files in about 20 directories

thanks for your replies

[purdon]

"Unavailable" doesn't necessarily mean "bad", it usually means "lost".

Did you try checking out the copypool volume with remove=no and checklabel=no and then checking it back in in search mode?

[BBB]

Sometimes its only a minority of files on a tape that are damaged.

See q content <vol> damaged=yes

Do a "upd vol <vol> acc=readonly", "move data <vol>" of the primary vol. This will get everything TSM can move off the tape that isn't damaged. Then do the restore vol.
Possibly different files on the primary and copy are damaged so you may not lose anything.

ANd as Purdon said, unavailable doesn't really mean its damaged. Was it checked in properly? DId you update it to acc=readwrite after checking it in?