Hi Nicholas,

I'm not sure what this thread is all about - but let me jump in
with what my view on this is:
ADSM uses the Volhist file to keep track of sequential access
devices used(tapes). It makes things easier when doing a DR
for your ADSM server - let me explain:
You do a DB backup at 05:00 in the morning and your DB backup
tapes go off-site and you are happy that you've done your part to
ensure that ADSM can be recovered in the event of a disaster.
You did not also send a copy of your volhist file off-site!
At 07:00 the same morning your ADSM server decides to kiss this
world good-bye and dies a horrible death. So bad that you do not
know which files were written out to which tapes and more important,
you don't know which tape has the ADSM DB backup on. Without
the volhist file you can kiss your job good-bye as well!
But, say you had the volhist file off-site and you get your new ADSM
server - whether NT/MVS/AIX/SUN whatever, this stays the same, you
bring up an empty ADSM server pointing to your backup copy of the volhist
file and say restore DB and ADSM will do the rest.

Now, I think this thread would have been about the volhist that never
automatically expire old copies of the DB backups. You have to issue
a command: del volhist todate=today-7 type=dbb (This means that
you want to only keep 7 days worth of DB backups and the rest must
expire and be returned to your scratch pool).

Let me know if you need additional info - this message is already getting
too long.

Regards

Christo Heuer
Johannesburg
South Africa
Christoh AT absa.co DOT za


> So what exactly does ADSM do with the volhistory file.  The advice I seem to
be getting is to do three things:
> 1        do a database backup
> 2        do a volhistory backup
> 3        delete the entry for my database backup from the volhistory
>
> Why?
>
> Murray Nicholas
> Systems specialist
> HALTEK PTY LTD
> Laurence,
> to delete that database backup so you can reuse the tape, issue a
> DELETE VOLHIST command. For database backups, you would put
> "TYPE=DBB". You can specify up to which date/time you want to delete
> (since you probably don't remember the ugly names ADSM gives to
> scratch volumes).
>
> Mike Broomhead
> Storage and Data Management,
> RS/6000 Sales Support, IBM Manchester
> =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=