Using Tapes from Another System

[buster99]

Hello, We have a situation where one of our locations that uses LTO tapes is no longer going to be using TSM for backups...this location has new and used tapes that I would like to use at another location with new labels...is there anything preventing us from loading previously used tapes into a new TSM environment with new labels ? Could the usual labeling script be used to load these tapes or would there be an issue because of their previous labelling and use ? Thank you

 

[RecoveryOne]

TSM is smart enough to know if another system touched the tape, you'd need to run the label libvol command with the overwrite=yes.

The main concern I see about using used tapes is you do not have an accurate mount/full write count of those used volumes.

 

[buster99]

Marclant, Thank you for the reply. So your concern is tracking tape quality ? Understandable. Hoping these aren't in se too long as we have a TSM software and library hardware upgrade planned for this year.

 

[moon-buddy]

Marclant, Thank you for the reply. So your concern is tracking tape quality ? Understandable. Hoping these aren't in se too long as we have a TSM software and library hardware upgrade planned for this year.

Just to clear things: RecoveryOne replied to your post and not Marclant!

 

[RecoveryOne]

Yes, my main concern would be tape quality. Now, that said...I've done exactly what you are planning to do. Budgets being what they are, choices have to be made. What I did, was before decommissioning the other server, I got all the number of times mounted and full write passes from the volumes. I discarded the highest of both. But in my case, I had tapes with 4000+ mounts and 90 passes.

 

[buster99]

Just to clear things: RecoveryOne replied to your post and not Marclant!

sorry about that...saw it on the bottom

 

[buster99]

Yes, my main concern would be tape quality. Now, that said...I've done exactly what you are planning to do. Budgets being what they are, choices have to be made. What I did, was before decommissioning the other server, I got all the number of times mounted and full write passes from the volumes. I discarded the highest of both. But in my case, I had tapes with 4000+ mounts and 90 passes.

Ok, Gotcha...I don't have that option as that server has died before decom. It wasn't a heavily used location like the one I'm trying to use the tapes on. Thanks again for the replies.

 

[moon-buddy]

Yes, my main concern would be tape quality. Now, that said...I've done exactly what you are planning to do. Budgets being what they are, choices have to be made. What I did, was before decommissioning the other server, I got all the number of times mounted and full write passes from the volumes. I discarded the highest of both. But in my case, I had tapes with 4000+ mounts and 90 passes.

LTO has bad reputation for maintaining read/write quality. I used 3592 tapes before and even old ones held up its quality for very long times.

 

[RecoveryOne]

LTO has bad reputation for maintaining read/write quality. I used 3592 tapes before and even old ones held up its quality for very long times.

My LTO6's seem to be doing better than previous generations (LTO1, 3, 4) by a factor of 3. I don't know much about the 7's and beyond how they are holding up. Then again, how we operate now vs when that media was in use is drastically different.