I've noticed some strange behavior here regarding tapes in filling status
going inactive and no longed being called upon to store more data. Here is
the whole story:

For disaster recovery tests we take a system snapshot and use this as a base
to run the test from. After the snapshot, all tapes in filling status are
either made unavailable or offsite depending on whether they are in the
primary or offsite tape pool. (UPD VOL * ACCESS=OFFSITE WHERESTG=COPYVAULT
WHERESTATUS=FILLING WHEREACCESS=READWRITE). After the DR test the tapes are
brought back onsite (UPD VOL * ACCESS=READWRITE WHERESTG=COPYVAULT
WHERESTATUS=FILLING).

Of course during the test the home system (Not DR) will start on a whole new
set of scratch tapes since the current batch of filling tapes are not
available. All is well up to this point. The problem is that after the test
when the filling tapes that were made offsite are brought back to readwrite
status those filling tapes are never used again even though their status is
filling and access is readwrite! These tapes are accumulating with each test
and they never reclaim since they are in filling status.

The only way I've found to get these tapes back is to build a listing of
them (SELECT VOLUME_NAME,DATE(LAST_READ_DATE) AS LASTDATE FROM VOLUMES ORDER
BY LASTDATE) then do a move data back to the same storage pool at which time
the data is moved to the current ACTIVE filling volume and the inactive
filling tape goes to pending status. Some strangeness I've seen during the
move data process is that the some of the "inactive" filling tapes are
showing as offsite volumes during the move data process (the data is moved
from the primary pool rather than the copy pool) even though a Q VOL xxxxxx
F=D clearly shows them as readwrite and not offsite.

Has anyone else noticed this and have you found a work-around? If I have to
do a move data on all of the tapes involved I'll be doing this until the end
of time.

 Take care,
 Alan Davenport
 Selective Insurance
 alan.davenport AT selective DOT com