>  I still have some questions about the use of copy storage pools. Suppose
> that a disaster occurs during the backup of the primary to the copy storage
> pools. In that case I don't have any tapes left to recover the system
> afterwards. So do you need to use two sets of copy pools or what (and the
> same for the backup of the database)? With the export I'm doing at the
> moment, I have a spare tape in the safe when I do the new export.

The usual approaches to updating copy storage pools also keep a usable set of
tapes offsite at all times. The exact method varies from site to site,
depending on resource requirements and the scheduling of courier runs, but
ours illustrates the basic principles.

About 13:00 ADSM starts offsite reclamation, which entails the following:
  Identifying offsite tapes whose percentage utilization is below an
installation-defined threshold (50% in our case).
  Determining which unexpired backup files are on these tapes.
  Copying the onsite versions of these files to scratch tapes.
  Updating the ADSM database to show that the tapes identified in the first
step are now empty.
Offsite reclamation finishes sometime between 15:00 and 19:00.
From 20:00 to around 6:30 the next morning, ADSM appends copies of newly
arrived backup files to the tapes written by offsite reclamation.
When the copying is done ADSM updates its database to indicate that the output
tapes are offsite, and to put the empty offsite offsite tapes into PENDING
status (which will cause ADSM to return them to scratch status a couple of
days later).
When the database updates are done ADSM backs up its database to a tape that
will be  sent offsite.
Around 10:40 all of the new offsite tapes are ejected from our automatic tape
library and a list of offsite tapes that have returned to scratch status is
generated.
Around 12:00 a courier collects the ejected tapes and the list and drops off
scratch tapes that were on the previous day's list.
During the afternoon tape librarians feed returned scratch tapes into the
automatic tape library.

The central point here is that offsite tapes come back only after their
surviving contents have been recopied from onsite tapes to new offsite tapes.