Can I restore from older tapes not in the DB anymore?

[paulexander]

Very inexperienced TSM user here, so forgive me if my terminology gets mixed up. I inherited a neglected TSM environment here, and am still trying to get a handle on things.

I just audited all of the tapes at my offsite storage location, and compared it against the volumes known in the database (q vol *). it appears I have over 200 tapes sitting out there that do not show up in TSM.

My question is, what is the plausibility of being able to restore anything from those tapes? And no, I cannot find any older backups of the TSM database anywhere. Maybe one of those tapes has an older DB backup, who knows....

Thanks

[chad_small]

The odds are slim unless you are willing to use a dump utility to try and recover any data from them. It's time consuming and a pain to use. I forget the name of the tool, but there is one out there that can read the raw data on the tapes and identify the file breaks.

[paulexander]

That's pretty much what I thought. I'm trying to convince my boss to let me dispose of them; the thought of querying all those tapes for potential old DB backups is absolutely depressing. We just cannot make any promises about the stated retention policy.

[moon-buddy]

Very inexperienced TSM user here, so forgive me if my terminology gets mixed up. I inherited a neglected TSM environment here, and am still trying to get a handle on things.

I just audited all of the tapes at my offsite storage location, and compared it against the volumes known in the database (q vol *). it appears I have over 200 tapes sitting out there that do not show up in TSM.

My question is, what is the plausibility of being able to restore anything from those tapes? And no, I cannot find any older backups of the TSM database anywhere. Maybe one of those tapes has an older DB backup, who knows....

Thanks

You have mentioned that the TSM environment has been neglected. Chances are, the 200 or so tapes are scratch tapes and can be reused if needed. Without old DB backups, there is next to zero that you can recover data the normal way.