Orphaned tapes in TSM

[jimanorris]

Running TSM 5.2 on AIX with a 3584.

I have 80 tapes that show in LibVolumes as Private but they do not show in Volumes. I assume this to mean that I can not use the tape again, unless I take action. How do they get in this status? How do I get them out? We are not utilizing DR. These are tapes in the library.

 

[davidsm]

Check that the volumes are not database backups with the command:



q volh type=dbb





If the volumes do not appear in that list, nor in a 'q vol' they can be used. Now, do you use scratch tapes (ie maxscratch parameter for your tape storage pools is > 0)? If so then you can checkout the tapes (with remove=no) and check them in again (using status=scratch search=yes).



If they do appear in the list then they are database backups and you have to look at when you run 'delete volh begind=-<days> type=dbb' to remove old database backups.



If you do not use scratch tapes but pre-allocted volumes then all you have to do is 'define volume' for each tape and associate it with a tape storage pool.



Tapes can get into this state if checked into the library as status=private and not allocated to a storage pool.

 

[AndyRH]

Tapes also can get into that state if they are not labeled, but checked in. We do a 'q vol TAPENUMBER' and 'q drm'. if not found then we check it out and then label the tape.



Andy

 

[jimanorris]

Thanks for the help! The problem was two-fold;

1) I did not know about the DbBackups not showing up in Volumes,

2) I forgot to note that I have two TSM servers, Production and Pre-Production, backing up to the same library.