Disaster Recovery using offsite tapes

[mricca]

Here is the deal. I have to write a procedure for disaster recovery should we need to restore a single server using our offsite tapes. For this procedure we still have our tape library onsite, but the tapes for this particular server are destroyed.
I know how to retrieve tapes from offsite to restore a bad tape, but I have actually never restored a server from our offsite tapes.
If someone has, could they kind of walk me through the steps.

I know how to query TSM for all the server tapes offsite using the select command. Our offsite tapes are not collocated...so this makes it even more fun. Once I have the lists and the tapes onsite. Do I check all of them in and them update them to readonly?
Do I have to mark all of the tapes that were damaged in the library as damaged so TSM knows to use the offsite tapes for the restore?
I guess I am confused on what exactly I do once I have the tapes onsite.
Hard to write a procedure for something I have never performed.

Any help greatly appreciated.

 

[alimirza]

Hello, It seems that you are not using TSM disaster recovery manager. How are you tracking your tapes i.e using move media or just updating them read only or OFFSITE and sending them offsite ?

What you will need to do once the tapes are onsite is to update their status to READO and then check them in the tape library. You will also need to mark the primary storage pool volumes that contains this nodes data as DESTROYED.

You can then run the restore from the client side and when TSM will see that the primary storage pool volumes needed for restore are destroyed, it will automatically look for the copy stg volumes. Since they will already be checked in the tape library, the restore will be done using copy stg volumes.

Hope this helps.

 

[mricca]

We are using DRM. We have scripts that run daily that show tapes to be sent offsite and tapes to come back onsite.
I just really needed to know if the recovery of a single client was similar to the recovery of a bad tape. Bring all the tapes needed back onsite and then check them in and make them readonly. I was hoping when I ran the restore on the client it would then use the copypool tapes since all the tapepool tapes were marked as destroyed.

Thanks for your assistance...it did clarify it for me. I have had to restore way too many tapepool tapes this way.