Yes, I do keep an eye on our media and cycle "old" TSM tapes. We have about 300 tapes onsite, 400 offsite.
Because TSM expires data based on policy and not on tape cycles, you do have the possibility of getting a few tapes that are very old. Because, as you said, the first backup from a client tends to be a large chunk, most of which does not change. Now "old" is a relative term that is going to depend a lot on your situation. I don't want any of our tapes to be more than 2 years old. Not because I worry about having media older than that, but because of microcode levels. We started with 3490 drives, which were no problem because it was a stable technology. But then we went to DLT for a short while, then STK9840's. For both DLT and 9840's, the drive microcode gets upgraded 2-4 times a year. I don't want to be in the position of trying to read a tape that is 10 generations of microcode older than my drives - nothing good can come of that, and it's easy to prevent. Now in practice I find I rarely have to cycle any tapes manually. Most of the tapes recycle naturally, anyway, and many of our clients don't exist more than 3 years because the hardware gets upgraded so frequently! Anyway, I check on it about once a year. Find maybe 5 tapes I decide to move manually. You could easily create a script to do it on a weekend..... ************************************************************************ Wanda Prather The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab 443-778-8769 [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Intelligence has much less practical application than you'd think" - Scott Adams/Dilbert ************************************************************************ -----Original Message----- From: Bill Mansfield [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Monday, October 22, 2001 5:45 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Lifespan of media I can't find a machine in our shop to read a 5.25" floppy. The lifetime of the media sometimes exceeds the lifetime of the technology. This is a particular problem with very long term archival. Even if the drive can read the tape, the software needs to be able to interpret it, which TSM has done pretty well with so far (but it is a proprietary format). On another topic: does anybody cycle their TSM tapes? I suspect that the "base" backup tapes for the operating system and other unchanging files tend to not get reclaimed very often. I know that I could do a query on the volume for last write date and do a move data from the old tape, but I'm curious to know if anyone out there does this. Veritas and the rest automatically cycle their tapes via their "expiration" process. _____________________________ William Mansfield Senior Consultant Solution Technology, Inc "Joshua S. Bassi" To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <jbassi@IHWY. cc: COM> Subject: Re: Lifespan of media Sent by: "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" <[EMAIL PROTECTED] RIST.EDU> 10/22/2001 04:16 PM Please respond to "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" DLT is 3 years 3590 is 10 years WORM is 100 years CD - don't know, but a lot I would guess -- Joshua S. Bassi Independent IT Consultant IBM Certified - AIX/HACMP, SAN, Shark Tivoli Certified Consultant- ADSM/TSM Cell (408)&(831) 332-4006 [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----Original Message----- From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Rupp Thomas (Illwerke) Sent: Monday, October 22, 2001 2:08 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Lifespan of media Hi TSM-ers, how long can I safely store data on different kind of media? For longterm archiving I need to know the lifespan of DLT, 3590, CD, WORM ... Is there a source on the internet for such information? Kind regards Thomas Rupp UIS - Informatik Services Vorarlberger Illwerke AG MAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TEL: ++43/5574/4991-251 FAX: ++43/5574/4991-820-8251 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------ Dieses eMail wurde auf Viren geprueft. Vorarlberger Illwerke AG ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------
