This depends on two things:
1) retention of the SAP archives
2) number of tapes

I've got our SAP archives going to a dedicated management class and storage
pool with a 21-day retention. As a result, the tapes are at 100% (but still
'filling') when they go off-site; 21 days later, they go pending -- and come
back.

This does mean that I've got 84 tapes (on average) off-site just in my
production SAP archives (4 tapes per day, roughly 72 GB each). If I did
reclamation, this would drop to about 60 tapes, but require running an
additional 280 GB of data *per day* through the tape drives. I just don't
think it's worth it.

I don't even reclaim the redo log tapes (two more storage pools/copy pools,
runs about 24 GB each per day and two more tapes per day going off-site).
These might almost be worth the time it takes to do the reclaims, but again
the tape goes pending in 21 days anyway.

And the 21-day retention came from a pragmatic approach. We wanted to
*always* have at least two off-line backups, which we do once per week. From
a business standpoint, we expect to never restore a version more than 8 days
old -- these are *not* for archival/legal retention. That's getting handled
by the SAP archiving process (and if not that way, I would *insist* on
exporting the data to flatfile for legal retention).

HTH --

Tom Kauffman
NIBCO Inc