How am I supposed to search for empty media?

[paulexander]

Hello, I am new to TSM ,and recently "inherited" a sadly neglected system.

I just did a physical inventory of all of the tapes in this IBM TS3500 library, and compared it against everything found in "q libvol", and found about 176 tapes sitting in the library that were not being used. Just to be sure, I took that list of barcodes, and queried all of the volume names, and sure enough, none of the tapes were considered to be used in TSM.

Even if I did an "Audit Libr ltolib checkLabel barcode", TSM still does not report any of those empty tapes.

So, I took them out, and just to see, I went ahead and did a "checkin libv ltolib search=bulk status=scratch", and they imported just fine, and became scratch.

My guess is that these are a combination of expired tapes that have been reclaimed, as well as improperly imported new blank tapes (the previous admin left me some commands, and it appears he was using incorrect instructions for importing new tapes)

Going forward, how in the world am I supposed to manage these expired tapes? What TSM command do I issue to search the library for ALL tapes, not just the ones that are still listed as Private or Scratch?

Thanks

 

[ProbablyDown]

-Running expiration and reclamation daily is a good thing.

-Also, you may want to look at how many TSM database backups you are keeping assuming they go to the tape pools. Type q volhist type=dbb to see how many tsm database backups and how far back they go. To clean that up, you might do:

del volhist todate=today-7 type=dbb

to remove any TSM Database backups older than 7 days. (your reuse delay and # of days you keep your database backups should match)

-Another thing you can look at is the reuse delay on the tape storage pools.

To find out all the tapes tsm is using, you will do a 'q vol' - this will show ALL volumes disk/tape - whatever, that TSM cares about. The only thing TSM doesn't track is expired Backupset volumes that aren't in the library. So if you do backupsets you should track them manually in a spreadsheet if you remove them from the library.

To look at all the tapes in the library - you already know that one - q libvol.

You can always do a 'help <command>' (i.e. help q libvol) to get help with particular commands.