How to discontinue the "offsite" tape movement of DRM

[MiniPlenty]

Hello TSM community,

Forgive me if I don't frame this question quite right the first time, I am still fairly new to administering TSM.

Currently we have a fairly common setup where we use DRM and once per week we run a script that cranks out a list of tapes that are in the 'mountable' state, and take them to an offsite location. We also get a list of tapes that are offsite and in 'vaultretrieve' status, and we bring those back and put them into the library as scratch.

We are in the process of preparing to move our entire tape library to a less-easily-accessible offsite location -- thereby negating the need for these weekly swaps (or so it is hoped).

My questions are regarding the best way to go about doing this: How do we re-import all those offsite volumes back into our library, and how to configure DRM such that I can still have the disaster recovery bits going, but not have to deal with the offsite/onsite-to-scratch process? Am I asking the right questions -- is there something I'm not taking into consideration?

Thanks in advance for any and all suggestions & comments,

MP

 

[moon-buddy]

If you are moving the library to a remote location with the hope of less swaps or no swaps of tapes - surprise! You will NOT escape swapping tapes!

You need to load tapes as scratch into your library and eject tapes that are mountable to achieve the DR functionality.

Thus, with the library near or remote from you, the action/job of 'moving' tapes remains.

 

[MiniPlenty]

Hmmm, I was afraid of that -- it being the primary point of DRM. The only other thing I thought of was loading up on scratch tapes to make trips to our Great New Location less frequent -- which will just increase the time of swapping in/out tapes per session (as there will be more).

Thanks for your comments -- it confirms what I've been suspecting.