> One thing I've thought of, but never tried, was, rather than reclaiming
> offsite tapes, deleting them.  The next "backup stgpool" you run will copy
> the data from those tapes to new copy pool tapes.  This way, with
> collocated primary pools, each tape is only mounted once, no matter how
> many offsite tapes would have been reclaimed.

One reason for making an offsite copy is to protect against a local
disaster.  What happens if a local tape should be physically
destroyed because of a tape drive failure?  Simple, you mark the
tape destroyed, request that it be restored, and TSM will mount the
offsite tapes and do the recovery.

If you have just deleted the "old" offsite tapes and are making fresh
copies via the backup stgpool command, you are dead because
there are no offsite copies from which to do the recovery.  Your
only way to recover would be to restore the database to the point
before you issued the delete command.  Of course, you would then
loose all the data that has just been backed up or archived.

I would feel very uncomfortable about doing a delete on the copy
tapes and then making fresh copies.  Probably will work for
99.999% of the time.  However, the one time it fails.....


Mike Hull               mhull AT uottawa DOT ca
Systems and Automation Analyst      613-562-5800 x 4587
Computer Centre        /  136 Jean-Jacques Lussier Room 543
University of Ottawa   /  Ottawa, Ontario   /  Canada   K1N 6N5