> Shifting focus to the other issue you brought up,
> the short lifespan of magnetic media.

This subject has been discussed before - see the archives.

If you don't want to wait for a hardware upgrade to force you to refresh
your data, a quick and easy way is to examine your volumes for 'date last
written' and just use the Move Data command on the oldest ones. This copies
the old tape onto another one.

If you're really doing the job properly, you ensure you only have new
scratch tapes when you do the move, and you make sure you can read the new
tape before letting the old one be overwritten. Or copy to 2 different copy
pools, or ... (fill in here depending on your paranoia level).

The definition of how old a tape can be before it needs refreshing, is up
to you.

Richard Foster
Norsk Hydro

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