Justin, We are in the same boat as you, more or less. We want to use a cycle retention that the courier can support and reclaim the tapes coming backup. I posted an example of how to do this about a week ago, but probably did not garner much respect because it seems like a really dumb thing to do. However, it really simplified our rotation and eliminated reclamation management.
To do what I do, you may need the DRM product set (DRMEDIA Table). Essentially, what I do is select all tapes that are going to come back in 2 weeks and move their data to new tapes in the copy pool. This causes TSM to take the data from the onsite PRIMARY pool and build tapes to go offsite this week for the stuff that is going to come back next week. That causes the offsite tapes to be placed in a VAULTRETRIEVE status. The command that I issue to find out what is coming back is: select * from drmedia where upd_date < current_timestamp - 14 days That tells me what is coming back soon. You can get elaborate and select only the volume name and pipe the stuff into the commands necessary to issue the commands dynamically, but I just do them manually right now. We are heading down the automated path soon. The command that I use to move the data is: move data [volume_name] stg=[same_copy_pool] By doing this I am not exposed and I my operations department was able to continue a tape rotation they are used do. The side effect is reclamation is automatically done by doing this. I love 2 bird solutions. You can accomplish this without the DRM module, but I like the MOVE DRMEDIA functionality becuase it automates a lot of stuff for me. -----Original Message----- From: Justin Derrick [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, January 24, 2002 8:06 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Mitigating Risk with TSM's incremental backups I've been using TSM for quite a few years on AIX, and surprisingly, this issue hasn't come up before. My customer is using TSM in conjunction with Content Manager OnDemand. The config looks like this: AIX 4.3.3 on H70 OnDemand, DB2, TSM Data is cached on disk (by OnDemand, not TSM), and also copied to Optical (a la 3995), then backed up to LTO. They are currently a very low-volume shop, adding under 1GB a day to the TSM system. The question raised to which I didn't have a good answer was: If we take a non-full LTO offsite for disaster recovery purposes, then bring it back onsite as part of regular rotation, a vulnerability is created. If the tape is on site when a disaster occurs (which would always be the case since their courier only delivers once a day), not only is that day's information lost, but all the previous days of incrementals previously written to the tape are destroyed as well. I know we could keep multiple copypools in the chain, but it seems like an expensive solution to a simple problem. The immediate solution would be to create new 'full' backups of the contents of the optical jukebox every day, and take them offsite. While this would actually be feasible in the short term (given their low growth) it would quickly become unmanagible in the future. Is the solution to simply buy enough tapes so that you simply send one tape a day offsite for as long as possible, then perform large reclaimation once every 'long as possible'? This sounds like it's within the realm of the DRM, which I'm woefully inexperienced with. Any advice, direction, etc. would be greatly appreciated. -JD.
