Suggestions to improve Tape Management

[Micro-Dona]

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As the title of this particular thread is saying what I wanted to ask over here. do you have any useful instruction to improve tape management then let me know about. It will give an idea how DPM can be improved in terms of type management. So I am waiting for your prompt replies on this particular. Thanks a lot in advance.

[Roey]

Looking at the situation I am posting below mentioned suggestion which can help you out.

• You should state what kind of tapes which you will use for every single day of week. Hence same tape can be used on that particular day of every single week.
  
• There should be quick erase option available for DPM user interface. There should not be need of accessing registry of system.
  
• To use tape "free" on DPM user interface and there should not be need of make use of any kind of scripts and hacks.
• One should be able to eject DPM by using tape, but I am not able to get how one will be implement the same.
• There should be something which will allow to mentioned total time catalogue was retained. It should be longer than that of retention period.
  
• Also we should mentioned group of pgs in which same kind of tapes are used. I mean PG1 and PG2 are using one type of tape where as PG3 and PG4 are using another kind of Tape.
  
• There should be flexibility in terms of restriction so that it would help you to protect backup so that it cannot be overwritten by another backup. It seems to be major issue in some situation.
• One should be able to view the content in column when you are clicking on the same.
• You should be able to backup to USB drives rather than that of Tape.
  
• There should be Grandfather Father Son kind of tape rotation into the tape auto-loader library.
• In case DPM is not designed for GFS by making use of tape library. We know that GFS backups seems to be universal practice so it should be implemented on tape libraries.

[Dannai7]

I really appreciate for the thing which you have asked over here. in my situation I am looking to delete tapes which are out from database. I purchased faulty tape so it was having warranty. However tapes are appearing into overdue section. Another thing I have noticed that one tape was being reading as 123456L4 on one library where as another library was reading as 123456L. it was happening because of checksum issue. one library was considering checksum where as another one was not considering at all. so there are lots of tapes which are L and it should be removed.

I got ‘Inventory failed, tape 123456L4 is in the drive.’ error message and it should be fixed.
There should be implementation of Auto Clean option. In case tape is not able to work then you should try to fix the issue by simply running backup against of same tape. If any tape jobs getting failed then it should be requeue and run again to complete the job.
We are already having an option to make an archive. There should be tape which can be overwritten and it should stay outside. You should simply use tapes according to slot number. If you are having slot 1-10 free then you should use it. it will help you to removing your tapes quite easily.

[JErastus]

Well I do agree with thoughts which you have stated in previous poster. Apart from that I am going to mentioned below post some more suggestions over here.

1. We should be able to make use of tapes into reverse order when you are using tapes into library autoloader. You must take out tape from the slot 8 and slot 7 at the time of backup. I think it would be more sensible if you are able to do the same into order.
   
2. We should be able to remove tape from catalog as well as remove recovery points which are associated with that particular tape. After removing tap DPM should not be able to remember the same.
   
   
3. As far as Windows Server Backup has been concerned , it lets you to add new drives for backup. So you will be able to have backup on it. you will be able to take out drives randomly. There will not be any issue with server until and unless it is getting connected. This particular thing will be helpful to use offsite backups which are stored on disk rather than that of tape. Hence you can use it as virtual library as it would have plenty of disks.

[Faiyaz9]

I would be really delighted if below mentioned suggestions are implemented.,

1. Auto free should be associated with tapes which are expired.
   
2. There should be limit for free tape threshold also we should be able to disable warning related with free tape threshold.
   
3. We should have functionality to cleaning tape in library.
   
4. They should fix all the error message which an admin is getting.
   
5. There should be tape for the tape which are expired.
6. We should be able to expire recovery points for tapes which are available into GUI. One should be able to library sharing.
7. Library sharing client dpm service should not crashing in case arbitration master getting down irrespective of whether is planned or unplanned.
   
8. You should be able to select retention period when you are trying to run backup on tap manually. Currently we are having tape jobs by means of shortest defined retention period.
9. There should be an option to auto free expired tapes and it will help for library sharing.
10. An option is needed to show offline tapes in dpm console, libraries and drives.
11. There is need of an option which is require to set warning threshold for the tapes which are available free.
    
12. It would be great if there would be an option which will indicate that all tapes are expired.

[Lisa Boney]

Retention period seems to be biggest issue with tape catalogue. DPM also deleting catalogues which are not necessary at all. By default DPM should retain all catalogues until and unless tape is overwritten by DPM. You should remove small amount of catalogs which you did not require. But it seems to be better options. In case any tape has been destroyed then there should be another backup system to be available. It should be fine if an option is provided to delete tape catalogues.