Are files in offsite volumes worthless once expiration has occured?

[andreas.luber]

Hi,



i am wondering if files in offsite volumes are worthless once expiration has occured, or if it's possible to re-import those files back to TSM?



I am thinking about using this in order to create "Monthly backups" in addition to the daily incrementals. I would like to retrieve some tapes from our library and store them in a safe, while maintaining a rather small storage pool.



Kind regards,



Andreas

 

[TBart]

It is my understanding that you can restore the volumes, but once expiration occurs again, those files that were previously expired will be expired again. I don't know how to prevent that from happening.

 

[tsmadm]

The best 2 options for this are backupsets and archives.



To explain the first question, once the data is expired and the volumes are re-used, the data is gone. The key is to have the database backup from when the files still existed. If the tapes have not been overwritten and you have the database backup, you can restore any data from any time. However, you do not want to do this on your production server.

 

[andreas.luber]

Backing up the database to a different system, that's interesting, thank you!



I guess i could create backup sets of all currently active files of a node to a special pool of tapes that can be retrieved from the library without any problems, right?



Thank you very much! :grin: