What I generally do is watch for drive errors and the tapes that cause it. If the same drive is causing errors I assume the drive is going. Each time I receive a tape error I document the date and tape, audit the tape, if errors exist I move the data off and make it a scratch tape, otherwise I set the tape back to read/write. After 3 occurances I move the data off and throw tape way. It seems to work well for us.
-----Original Message----- From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Bill Rozmiarek Sent: Friday, May 27, 2005 9:26 AM To: [email protected] Subject: When Good Tapes Go Bad How do you go about determining that a tape is bad and needs to be thrown replaced? The way I do it is to keep track of any tapes that have been set to read-only due to an error (q act msg=1411). When I see one, I mark it read-write and keep track of it. When the same tape gets set to read-only due to an error a second time, I do a 'move data' if there's anything on it and then eject it, delete the volume, and replace it with a new tape. I don't know that that tape is really bad so I could be throwing tapes (and money) in the garbage unnecessarily. Is there a way to certify a tape like I can a disk? How do you determine that a tape needs to be replaced? -Bill -- Bill Rozmiarek http://GatheredTogether.org - Ministries Helping Ministries
