RE: Multiple backups on single tape? -- MIDRANGE-L

Brian,

IBM is not likely to support this kind of recovery scheme.  Nor is
Microsoft for that matter (I'm speaking off the top of my head here, but
I would imagine that if you ran into trouble on Ghost, Microsoft would
suggest that you reload from your distribution CD or contact the vendor
of Ghost (I'm willing to be wrong on this one though)).  It is something
that could be implemented however.  All that is required is that a PC
with a RAID array be recognized as a tape drive through DST.  Someone
may have been working on such a configuration on this list.  I recall
some postings a while back.

I really don't see the market though.  This would allow for the
substitution of thousands of dollars of technology for a few hundred
dollars of tape, all of which may never be used.  Think about it, do you
really see a market for something like this?  The common application of
Ghost (and the majority of its licenses probably), replicating identical
desktops, really doesn't apply to the iSeries market.  Nor is the
iSeries as likely to experience a catastrophic failure as a
Microsoft/Intel platform.  I think that IBM is awake on this one.

I understand your frustration however.  You've got some rather expensive
large-capacity tapes which are not being used completely.  They're
costing you money and you would like to use them to their full capacity.
I don't know of a solution for this.  I've never done a SAVSTG and
generally don't have more a few copies of a SAVSYS at any one time.  Are
you running these commands frequently?  Traditional disaster recovery
would perform the SAVSYS after only after major PTF applications.

Regards,
Andy Nolen-Parkhouse

> Subject: Re: Multiple backups on single tape?
>
> From: "Andy Nolen-Parkhouse" <aparkhouse@attbi.com>
> To: <midrange-l@midrange.com>
> Sent: Wednesday, June 12, 2002 11:18 AM
> Subject: RE: Multiple backups on single tape?
>
>
> > In a way, this makes sense.  The main purpose of either of these
saves
> > is to recover a system, often at power up without operator
intervention
> > which would allow the specification of a file sequence number.  When
> > powering back up from a crash, you have a tape with three SAVSYS's
on it
> > and need to reload your system.  What do you do?  How could you tell
the
> > system to use the middle one?
>
> What I'm about to say isn't useful, but I still feel like saying it.
> Norton's Ghost for PCs essentially does SAVSTG -- it creates
compressed
> images of an entire disk or disk system.  It's possibly to save any
number
> of these images to a spare hard disk, provided that it has space, and
> restore from any one of them in the case of a catastrophic failure.
IBM,
> please wake up.
>
> Thanks for the info, though!  I'll work something out to make
effective
> use
> of the tapes I have.
> brian.