????
This sounds really weird to me.  Something is very confused.

By DR media, do you mean the stand-alone restore capability of DRM which
lets you restore using floppy disks (which I have never used), or do you
mean your tapes in a COPY POOL that are managed by DRM and moved offsite?

The DRM-managed tapes in a COPY pool can certainly be used for files
restores or volume.  And RESTORE VOLUME certainly works to rebuild
individual volumes, not necessarily the whole pool.

When your restore fails because a tape is bad (or missing in your case),
there are 2 things you can do.

1) RESTORE VOLUME, which you attempted.  If your copy pool tapes are
offsite, they must be brought onsite in order to use them, of course.  You
can do a RESTORE VOLUME, PREVIEW=YES to get a list of the tapes you need.
ADSM will mark the primary tape as being DESTROYED, then copy the data from
the COPY pool tapes back to the primary pool.  Then you can start your
restore again.

2) RESTORE directly from the COPY pool tapes.  First, of course, you must
bring the copy pool tapes back to where your tape drives are, as before.
Then all that is necessary is to change the properties of the primary volume
to DESTROYED (DON"T DELETE IT, just mark it DESTROYED).  Change the
properties of your copy pool tape back to READONLY instead of OFFSITE.  Then
when you start your restore, ADSM will see the primary pool tape is
unavailable, and automatically call for the COPY POOL tapes instead of the
primary tapes.

I have done this MANY times.

If you attempted a RESTORE VOLUME, I can think of two things that can cause
the "contains files that cannot be restored" message.

One is if your copy pool tapes are still marked OFFSITE, so that ADSM
believes it has no tapes available for the RESTORE VOLUME.

The other is if the files really AREN"T in your copy pool.  This can happen
when a tape is flaky and you get a WRITE error when creating the COPY POOL
copy. But this is not very likely with 3590 tapes, and you would most likely
have gotten the "contains files that cannot be restored" message for just
some files, not the whole tape!

The only reason you would need ANOTHER copy pool is to have a way to do a
RESTORE VOLUME without having to go get your COPY pool tapes out of the
vault.  We actually DO that for our DLT copy pools, because they aren't that
reliable on read-back, and we would be making extra trips to the vault every
month.  But we DON"T do that for our enterprise-class media, doesn't happen
often enough that going to the vault for the tape once a year is a problem..

Hope this helps.  Whoever told you you can't restore from a COPY pool tape,
and that you have to restore your whole library VERY confused.  That's bosh.

************************************************************************
Wanda Prather
The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab
443-778-8769
wanda_prather AT jhuapl DOT edu

"Intelligence has much less practical application than you'd think" -
Scott Adams/Dilbert
************************************************************************







> -----Original Message-----
> From: Scott Fluegge [SMTP:sfluegge AT VENATORGROUP DOT COM]
> Sent: Monday, July 26, 1999 10:36 AM
> To:   ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
> Subject:      Disaster-Recovery, Any value?
>
> OK,  I have had a minor disaster here which is making me fear the worst.
>
> We lost one of our Novell Servers and had to rebuild it.  This meant
> restoring
> it from ADSM.  The restore was started and was chugging along fine until
> it
> called for a tape that it couldn't find.  The restore died at that point.
> It
> turns out that the volume in question has disappeared.  Our librarians
> have no
> idea what happened to it.  No problem I thought.  I would just rebuild the
> tape
> using my disaster-recovery pool (We use ADSM's DR manager).
>
> I used the restore volume command but it came back saying the volume
> contained
> files that could not be restored.  After many calls to IBM (I finally got
> level
> 3 help), I was told that there was no way to restore a single volume, or
> even a
> single node from disaster-recovery media.  My data was simply lost and
> un-recoverable (even though there was a copy of the data in DR).  I was
> told
> that DR was only meant to rebuild an entire library and had no ties to
> files or
> nodes.   I was told that if we lost our on-site location and needed to
> rely on
> our DR tapes, the first thing we would have to do is re-create our entire
> library.  That we could not use the DR tapes directly, they would first
> have to
> rebuild the entire library.  I have more than 15 terrabytes of data being
> held.
> If I had to wait to build that it would take weeks before I could even
> start
> restoring nodes!!!
>
> The support person continued to tell me that for the future I should
> create a
> second storage pool, an on-site copy pool.  That would provide the only
> means
> for rebuilding tapes.  But I would need to purchase more than 1000 3590c
> tapes
> at around $100 each!  Not to mention the storage consideration.  We have 8
> frames in our 3494 and it is FULL! and keeping that much additional data
> would
> pound our database and dramatically reduce its response time.
>
> What are you all doing?  Does anybody use the DR manager and expect it to
> work
> the way I used to?  Am I missing something?  We are re-thinking our whole
> philosophy here and I could use some help and support!
>
> Thanks!!!!!
>
> Scott