I found out today it appears that a BACKUP STGpool command will just skip
tapes that are in an UNAVAILABLE, DESTROYED, or DAMAGED status and put out a
little warning message and give you a SUCCESS.  DESTROYED is not a problem
because I took the overt action to say it was destroyed, but skipping
UNAVAILABLE or DAMAGED is not good.  I would bet there are hundreds of
customers not aware of this.   The exposure is your copypool (disaster
recovery set) may not include all of the data and not a valid restore point.
Unfortunately, a tape can get in the UNAVAILABLE status just because the
tape library had a problem dismounting the tape.

I have developed a workaround:

select volume_name, access from volumes where access not in
('OFFSITE','READONLY','READWRITE','DESTROYED') and stgpool_name LIKE
'TAPE_%'
ANR2034E SELECT: No match found using this criteria.
ANS8001I Return code 11.

This generates a return code 11 if everything is OK, zero is not good.

I am developing a script to do my backup commands and capture if there are
pools with errors.

Everyone may want to at least run this against your primary pools to see if
you have any.  All my primary pools begin with "TAPE_".  Remember % is splat
and _ is placeholder.

Paul D. Seay, Jr.
Technical Specialist
Naptheon, INC
757-688-8180

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