Folks,

I'd like to setup a daily scheduled full backup of our ADSM server
database; I'd planned to use 3590 tapes in a 3494 tape robot for the
backups.  Given the capacity and speed of the 3590 tapes and drives,
I didn't see any reason to do incremental backups.

But I also don't want to allocate an indefinite number of tapes to
the DB backups; I figured that a tape rotation of 4-5 tapes would
be adequate.

The problem that I'm running into is that once a tape has been used
for a DB backup, I don't seem to be able to find a way to make it
re-usable for another DB backup some number of days later.  The tape
volume is marked "Private, DBbackup" according to a "query libvol".
I've tried changing it to just "Private" or even to "Scratch" (with
an "update libvol" command), but when I try to backup my database
to that tape again, I'm told that:

        ANR4583E Database backup terminated - output media full
        and scratch media could not be mounted.

How do folks out there manage regular automatic or scheduled DB backups?
Do you just use some other kind of device (eg DEVCLASS=FILE) and manually
erase some of the files when too many backups have accumulated, or is there
some trick to getting a DB (tape?) backup rotation in place?

                        Thanks,
                                Judy

--
Judy Warren                             jsw AT tc.cornell DOT edu
Judy Warren                             jsw AT tc.cornell DOT edu
Cornell Theory Center                   (607) 254-8792