Re: Extract a tape

On Oct 24, 2006, at 5:38 AM, Douglas Currell wrote:

Hello,

  One of my users requested that his 200GB directory be backed up
so that  he could recover the disk space. This was done by TSM,
albeit with some  errors such as "Object  '/mnt/propag/Popeye_Data/
Blablabla/blablabla/BLABLABLA/blablabla.mat'  contains unrecognized
symbols for current locale, skipping..."

  Once the backup was complete and the disk space recovered on the
client, (rm -rf /mnt/propag/Popeye_Data/*.*), a request was made
for a  physical tape containing the data. I don't want to create an
entire  backupset as this directory is only part of a much larger
filespace and  I'd prefer if TSM would NOT manage the tape's
whereabouts, etc. Assume  that I have no disk space to work with, a
reasonable assessment.

  The user did not specify a format but a compressed tar file would
be  nice but TSM format is acceptable. My operating system is Suse
8 and  I'm using TSM Server 5.2.2. How can I give him a tape with
his data on  it?


Douglas -

You have a bunch of problems here...

First, the LOCALE setting being used in the environment of the backup
is not encompassing the special characters (e.g., umlaut) which
appear in files being backed up.  A LOCALE of POSIX accommodates only
characters 0-127 in the table.  A LOCALE of C or en_US is more
encompassing.

Second, your backup is NOT complete, making the obliteration of the
client data very problematic.  It would seem that much of this data
no longer exists.

Third, giving the user a TSM tape is not helping him, both because
the tape format is proprietary to TSM and thus useless to the user
for later utility use, and because the data is indexed out of the TSM
database - and is liable to expire, depending upon how backups are
being done on that client system.  The TSM Archive facility should be
used for preservation of this type, where the tape would stay in the
tape library for later use by the user.

To service a request like this, where the user has no tape drive on
his system but wants a tape in hand, I would attempt to perform a
remote tar operation, via tar|ssh|tar or via the rmt utility, to one
of your TSM-server-attached drives, using a fresh tape or an empty
one checked out of TSM.  This would constitute portable media which
the user could employ at any later time at an arbitrary site.

    Richard Sims