I believe a tape that is in Filling status that is marked Offsite is also eligible for reclamation. We send all copy pool tapes offsite every day (and the last one for each pool is still in a filling status.) These filling tapes do get reclaimed.
An issue we've just noticed is that the reclamation value for these filling tapes is skewed resulting in some inefficient offsite reclamations. We use client compression and were using the default estimated capacities for LTO Tapes (190GB). Our full Tapes on average get about 112GB of data (after software compression). So when a tape is filling, say 100 GB of data, TSM shows as 52% utilized. (Although in reality it is really probably 89% utilized.) So if we set our offsite reclaim to say, 48% it would reclaim the filling tape. Not very efficient since the tape is really only 11% reclaimable! So we've just updated all of our estimated capacities to be the average amount that we get for the full tapes in that pool. This should make for more efficient offsite reclamations. Again this only applies if you are using software compression. Another bonus, now the pct utilized of our pools is a fairly accurate number! >A tape in a filling state will not reclaim unless it is >marked readonly and meets the reclamation criteria, or at least I have been >told that. >Now, the question, how many tapes are in a filling status. How many of >those are marked readonly and over the reclaim threshold. If it is a lot >then you are getting a lot of media write errors that are marking the tapes >readonly. This could be a bad tape drive or a bad batch of tapes, or tapes >destroyed by a bad tape drive.
