How to perform another FULL backup of primary storage pool - best strategy

[rico]

Hi,



In my off-site vaulting scenario, I have a primary storage pool with data that _never_ expires (I'm backing up an archive system). I set up a copy storage pool to create backups of the primary storage pool volumes to take those tapes off-site.



From what I see in the Tivoli documentation and posts here in the forum, the "backup stgpool" command always performs an incremental backup of the primary storage pool.



That's good so far, all I'd have to do is run the "backup stgpool" command every day, which would probably spit out only one tape and take that tape off-site.



For a better tape utilization, I could set up reclamation, bring tapes with some free space back for reuse. However, this reuse only applies to tapes with free space left and since data never expires, volumes that are off-site would never come back on-site again (given that every volume is filled).



Tapes have a finite lifespan and go bad after a certain time. With my current setup they would never be brought back on-site again. This concerns me a bit.



How would I perform a new full backup on fresh tapes?



I scanned through the Tivoli docs and found two possibilities of which I like the second one better. Looks like creating a new full backup is not possible, but I could either:



1) Mark the off-site volumes as deleted using the "delete volume" command

or

2) Move the data from off-site tapes to other tapes in the copy storage pool on-site and take them back to the vault



Each of those cause the state of the off-site tape to change to "vaultretrieve" and "backup stgpool



Is this (second) strategy a good idea?



Does anybody have a better idea how to replace a tape that has been in a dark, cold vault for ages with a nice fresh copy?



As always, thanks in advance,

Rico.

 

[tpoppe]

I have a very similar requirement, with a different reason.



We have two sets of off-site tapes that we maintain. One is a daily off-siting to a fairly local vault that we maintain and can recall tapes at will. This is our primary disaster recovery tape set. Our second off-siting goes to a commercial courier in a case that is sealed and returned only when we ask for it to be returned. As a result, we don't have the ability to recall tapes at will.



We need the ability to create full backups of primary storage pools every week for the secondary site, and daily incrementals for the primary site.



Help!

 

[heada]

Rico,



I would suggest the move data command. Using that command, you'll never have less than 2 copies of the data while using the delete volume command you'll only have the primary copy until you make a new offsite copy.



You can query the TSM database to find out when a tape was last written to and then use that list to move the data off the tapes that are beyond the threshold for the tape. The tape provider should give a lifetime of the tape, so I would use that number (maybe a bit less...to make sure) For example, IBM says the data on the 3592-J1A tapes is good for 5 to 7 years. I would look for any tape older than 4 years and move the data off of that onto new tapes.



-Aaron