Worm tape and expiration.

[Metitloup]

Hi everybody;

I got a question :

Is there a way to retrieve some expired files which are still on worm tapes?

I got some expired files and tsm returns no result for these ones which is technically normal but as they are on worm tapes, the files must still be present. Is there a way to get these files back?

These files were archived with a wrong management class (expired on 2012/09 instead of 2042/09)

Thanks a lot for every clue.

Vincent

 

[rmazzon]

Your current TSM instance will not be able to access those files. Assuming you have a DBB from before the expiration you could use it to restore your TSM instance to that point in time and then attempt a restore. This would require a server, disk, network isolation and access to a tape drive in such a way as not to affect your production environment.

Or, you can try and locate a third party that can sequentially read the data and place it into a format that can be read without TSM. In my organization we had a need to do something similar, i.e., read data on tapes after TSM removed all pointers to it. We ultimately could not do what we wanted to do but there were extenuating circumstances that I can't list. But, IBM (of course) and a company called Renew Data seem to have the ability to read TSM tapes and pull information that was "deleted" but not overwritten. I say "seem to" as I did not perform those inquiries and this comment is based on what was reported to me.

There are probably other firms that can also perform this, but it won't be cheap.