Thought I'd see what the list thought about the following (sort of a RFC as it were).
We've got TSM 4.1.4.2 on OS/390 with a 3494 tape library using VTS volumes for the backuptapepool (soon to implement native 3590). We use RMM for tape management and send 3490 tapes offsite for DR. A user was restoring some files and encountered a failure on one specific file. Error msg was file not found on server. Server log showed mount failed. So, turns out that the logical volume could not be mounted because the physical (stacked) volume was/is not in the robot, and I checked every frame manually!. A search of syslogs from the time the file was backed up (last Oct.) turned up that the tape had been ejected (another mystery to solve, where's the darn cartridge!?) yet the data was not copied off. IBM has no clue how it could have happened that way, and obviously neither do we. So, what do we do with this orphaned data? We can query the volume in TSM so know what data is on the tape. We could run some selective backups on required data (there's a reasonable number of folders affected) that would expire these older versions, but that's a bit arduous. We could delete the volume and discarddata and have it back up again, but the fact that we discovered this because of the need to restore makes me a little queasy on that one. We could mark the volume as damaged, but not sure exactly how that would work. Would the offsite copies be called back and new copies made, or not? I don't think the audit volume process would do anything for us. The other issue is how do we find out what else might have been on this tape? What say you? -- Jim Kirkman AIS - Systems UNC-Chapel Hill 966-5884
