I have used the restore volume command on several occasions successfully.  I
don't understand IBM's response, but I can tell you the command worked on 3490E
and 3590 media.  If you have files that cannot be restored it means you need to
backup your local tape pool to the offsite pool on occasion.  Somehow you are
gettting files in it that haven't been copied offsite.  It happens at my site
because a few client nodes dump data into the disk pool after the offsite copy
starts.  Another explanation would be the backup going direct to tape due to
management class or a huge file exceeding the limit.

If the files are not in the offsite pool and the onsite tape volume is damaged,
then you probably will not be able to recover though some other more experienced
user may have an "incantation" that can retrieve the data of which I am unaware.

This answer is based on my experience and my understanding of the documentation.
If anyone has information to the contrary, please enlighten me.


> I used the restore volume command but it came back saying the volume
> contained files that could not be restored.  After many calls to IBM (I
> finally got level 3 help), I was told that there was no way to restore a
> single volume, or even a
> single node from disaster-recovery media.  My data was simply lost and
> un-recoverable (even though there was a copy of the data in DR).  I was told
> that DR was only meant to rebuild an entire library and had no ties to files
> or nodes.   I was told that if we lost our on-site location and needed to
> rely on our DR tapes, the first thing we would have to do is re-create our
> entire library.  That we could not use the DR tapes directly, they would
> first have to rebuild the entire library.