Simple TSM Tape resuse problem

[eastleyd]

I am having a problem re-using tapes in TSM. I have a single tape drive defined in a manual library - hence - no need to check in/out tapes.

I have a set of 15 tapes, all labelled and volumes defined with the same names as the tapes.

I stick the tape in the drive, and get all the tsm clients to back up to it over night. - works fine!

then during the day, I remove the tape, and stick the next one in the sequence into the drive. The same process happens again..backup overnight, replace during the day.

This goes on for 15 cycles - until my tapes are all used.

I then want to go back to the first tape and overwrite it (there will be nothing needed on that tape) - even though it is an incremental backup each night. - if a file hasn't been touched for 15 days, it is a gonna - thats no problem - its how we want it.

The problem is, when I try to write to a tape that has already been used, it is rejected.

How do I clear/emtpy the volume so I can start writing back to it - do I really need to delete the volume, relabel the tape, and re-create the volume!??!?

Any help would be great.

cheers

 

[comtec17]

Are you running expiration and reclaimation to expire your versions and reclaim wasted space on the tape.

 

[eastleyd]

Nope, I'm not, how would I do that. Basically all the contents of the tape need to go. - Its a Win2k TSM 5.2 Server - but a command would be ideal.

Thanks

 

[comtec17]

How is your versioning setup?

You can run the command "expire inventory" and check the activity log to see how many entries were expired.

 

[eastleyd]

My version is set up as follows:

Policy Domain: STANDARD, Pool: BACKUPOOL

If clinet Data Exits: 15
If client Data is deleted: 15
Length of time to retain extra backup version: 15
length of time to retain only backup version: 15


thinking about it, I could set it all to 1 day, as the tape is changed each day so i wont really remove it. - or will the entry be removed from the database aswell?


The expire inventory thing, will that let me expire everything in a particular volume? that way, I could expire the volume associated with the tape I put in each day.