Transporting 3590 tapes to off-site valut

[mjohnson]

These questions are about the mechanics of sending 3590 tape to an off-site vault.



1) Do you enclose each 3590 cartridge into it's own separate case.



A) If so, are the cases clear or opaque?



B) If clear which case do you use, i.e. part number & source?



C) If opaque then how do you label the case, i.e. do you use

the number of the tape inside the case?



When the case is reused for a different tape, do you re-

label the tape?



Thanks,

Milton

 

[AndyRH]

We use a "Turtle", it is opaque, water proof, and holds 20 tapes. Our off-site people place the tapes in a tape rack since you never know exactly when a tape is coming back.



Andy

 

[jcoats]

We use turtle cases too, for our LTO tapes. Similar in concept.



We have 5 cases that return to our site daily during the week days, one per day.

(a Monday case, a Tuesday case, etc.)



We put all the tapes that come out of the library into that days case. And pull all the tapes that are due to return from that case each day. Each case can hold 20 tapes.



We also prepare a 'dr floppy' and put it in a spare LTO tape case each day. The old floppy is pulled from the case to be reused daily. The DRFloppy has on it the last few DRM Plan Files, and a copy of planexpl.vbs (since we are a windows shop).



Do we have some recoverable tapes offsite all the time? Yes. But it is not very many usually, and you will have access to every tape once per week.



Is it the best solution? Probably not. But we pay to have one case delivered daily, and the same case is taken back offsite the same day (typically within 30 minutes of delivery, the driver just waits ).



For a big site, the investment in unrecovered reusable media might be to high, I havn't run the economics on it.



In the case of a disaster or a DR test, all (5 currently) cases are taken to the recovery site.



We tend to have about 35 tapes in our 72 (I think) max tape library, 6 of those are scratch, offsite we have 41 tapes, with 2 available for recovery. 7 are also in 'pending' waiting to finish expiring to be made available for recovery.



At least this should give you a sense of how our site is working.