Re: Ultrium 4 Tape Initialization

Sadly the 'Just Initialize It!' mentality DOES run through nearly every shop. It's a Land Mine of course, accidentally leave the wrong tape in the drive and it becomes DAILY sometime around midnight......

I have long preached unique volume IDs. A tape gets a number FOR LIFE and the number dies with the tape. If you get in to tape library land you cannot live any way but this but you should even with single tape drives. Years ago back in the open reel tape days we did this. A user did something stupid (I know, hard to believe) and essentially ruined one table. I looked at the table and it told me which tape it had been backed up on the night before. I asked my operator to mount that tape and recovered the file. The operator came back in a bit later and said "Why that volume, that's for tonight's backup?". "The volume labels do not lie." Then she figured out she had made a mistake and used the wrong tape. So the system was right and the data was right, proper volume names to the rescue.

As was also mentioned the error counts and total read/write counts are also kept by volume so when you're having issues with volume DAILY, which one?

Anyway. FIX IT, before data loss occurs.

- Larry

John,

You are exactly right in what should be done for tape management.
You would be surprised how many places do what your shop does.

Pete

Pete Massiello
iTech Solutions
http://www.itechsol.com