We knocked together a fairly simple little script that does a "query volume acce=of st=emp" and routes the result to a printer. This takes care of all the ADSM managed tapes, and leaves only the database backups to deal with.

We put copies of the volume history, device config, and selected volume lists on a floppy as part of our database backup, and strap these floppies to the database tape before it goes off-site. They're color-coded by week, and labeled with the day of week. When our weekly pull process occurs, we just grab the database tapes with next week's floppies on them.

We use a three-week rotation, with Red, Orange, and Yellow floppies - so if we're writing Red this week, the weekly pull will bring back all the Orange.

Reasonably simple, and (so far) quite effective.

Tom Kauffman
Sr. Technical Analyst
NIBCO, Inc.

-----Original Message-----
From:   Virginia Hysock [SMTP:vhysock AT CSC DOT COM]
Sent:   Monday, February 22, 1999 11:58 AM
To:     ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject:        More Questions on DR Without DRM

Hi all,

     I got some good information from a couple of you on how you get tapes
for offsite movement ejected from your IBM 3494 library (with an AIX ADSM
server) - thanks for that!  Now, can any of you that are sending tapes
offsite with an AIX server clue me in on how you are managing the tapes
while they're offsite??  I.E., how do you know when to bring them back?
How do you alert your offsite location to send them back?  I'm basically an
MVS'er, and am totally lost without a tape management system!  Do some of
you have homegrown TMS's or what?

                         Thanks in advance,

                         Ginny