I hope you will excuse me to be so direct but I think that you last answer is stupid, did you ever look at the price of a single drive library compared to a three drive library ? And I don't talk of the fact that most 3 drives libraries require the advanced library TSM feature which multiplies the price of TSM by 4 ! But I think this is why you talk of a BIG favour, it is because the price is BIG. If you compare the whole solution, you will see that the whole solution has a price multiplied bye 4 or more which makes it unaffordable for most companies. I completely agree with you that a three drive (or at least two drives) library is far more practical with TSM but it is very expensive. In addition, what is the use of buying a 2 or 3 Tbytes library when you need only 200 or 300 Gbytes. I saw in this list some people saying that TSM is only for big companies and that if you can't afford a 2 drives library, you should'nt buy TSM. I also disagree with that, TSM has some functionalities which make it usefull also for small companies (I had another storage software before and for example, I saw that with TSM, I could reduce the number of tapes to buy, and then to manage by 2 or 3) I think it wouldn't be a lot of work for Tivoli just to add a few functionnalities which would allow small companies to use it with a single drive or with a small library. Don't forget that many companies uses only a single drive on each server and if you talk to them of the price of TSM with advanced library and a 3 drives library, they laugh. Anyway, the cheapest configuration which I use without buying a "BIG" library and which is practical with TSM is to add an external drive which I use for the copy pool. You just need to have a drive which can contain at least the amount of data you backup each day. It is not a real problem that you have to change the copypool tapes each day as it is what everybody make usually, even with a library. The only thing which is a bit annoying is that I still didn't find a best way than creating a script which set all the copypool tapes to writeonly except the tape which is intended to be used. And I have to modify the script each time I change a tape which is full. But I must admit I still didn't understand very well how TSM manages the use of a single external drive. Sometimes, I can put any tape and everything is ok, and some other times, I put in an empty tape and TSM asks me for another. This is why I had to create this script. But I still didn't spend the time I should have to solve this problem.
Etienne GUILLAUMONT e-mail : [EMAIL PROTECTED] RGB Technologie Parc d'Innovation, Batiment PYTHAGORE 11 Rue Jean SAPIDUS 67400 ILLKIRCH Tél : 03 90 40 60 60 Fax : 03 90 40 60 61 Mark Stapleton To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <stapleto@BER cc: BEE.COM> Subject: Re: Off site copy with one drive??? Sent by: "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" <[EMAIL PROTECTED] RIST.EDU> 01/10/02 13:19 Please respond to "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Etienne Brodeur > Is it possible if I have a one drive library to use a copy storage pool > for my backups? Yes. > I can backup to disk, then backup the diskpool to the copypool. (this way > I should have all my data onsite and offsite). Exactly. You backup from diskpool to offsite pool, and then you migrate from diskpool to primary tape pool. > How do I then reclaim my copypool volumes? You can't. TSM doesn't support a disk-based reclamation pool for reclamation of offsite tape pools. > I can't reclaim to disk like I > do with my onsite volumes for some reason (I don't see why not since the > DB can track which file is on which onsite tape mount it and copy it to my > reclaimpool on disk. Once that is done it can mount a scratch or copypool > volume and the offsite volumes would be reclaimed no? One-drive libraries are pretty much worthless. Particularly if you have large-capacity tape volumes, your disk-based reclamation pool needs to be at least 40% of the maximum size of the tape volume. In the case of LTO tapes, that means 80GB of disk space for the reclamation pool. Do yourself a BIG favor. Get a three-drive library. -- Mark Stapleton ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Certified TSM consultant Certified AIX system engineer MCSE