Hello all, I'm still relatively new to Tivoli administration, so I'm hoping this problem I've come up against turns out to be something someone here has seen before.
A number of months ago (before I joined my current team) my manager made the decision to increase the data retention period for our tape library from 3 months to 6 months. (I guess this is done at the management class level?) This decision was made without considering if we had enough tapes in our library to support the move, and is it turned out, we did not! My tape machines are nearly empty, and there are only a small handful of 3590's I can put in the machines which do not show up in a "q vol" report ... and all this is happening right before our monthly archive backups which are scheduled to run this coming Saturday night. On to my question... I need to start freeing up tapes with data older than 5 months. It seems to me that the way to accomplish this is with the "delete volume" command. However, when I execute this command versus a tape, I get the following message: ***** ANR1425W Scratch volume 000101 is empty but will not be deleted - volume state is "mountablenotinlib". ***** Here's the volume history for this tape: ***** Volume Name: 000101 Storage Pool Name: AIXPOOL Device Class Name: 3590TAPE01 Estimated Capacity (MB): 0.0 Pct Util: 0.0 Volume Status: Empty Access: Read-Only Pct. Reclaimable Space: 0.0 Scratch Volume?: Yes In Error State?: No Number of Writable Sides: 1 Number of Times Mounted: 1 Write Pass Number: 1 Approx. Date Last Written: 02/23/04 08:46:58 Approx. Date Last Read: 02/23/04 05:13:52 Date Became Pending: Number of Write Errors: 0 Number of Read Errors: 0 Volume Location: Last Update by (administrator): ADMIN Last Update Date/Time: 02/23/04 22:20:38 ***** So basically, what I need to do is free up tapes such as the one above so that my 3494's will turn them into scratch volumes again. I couple of things confuse me here though. First, the tape above is already older than 6 months (or 180 days, which is what the retention period is set at), so why does it still show up on the "q vol" report? I'm assuming that any tape which shows up when you do a "q vol" won't be turned into a scratch volume. That would seem to be confirmed by this output from my "label" command: ***** ANR8816E LABEL LIBVOLUME: Volume 000101 in library 3494LIB cannot be labelled because it is currently defined in a storage pool or in the volume history file. ***** How do I get this tape out of the volume history file? I'm assuming this is an issue with the volume history file, as opposed to an issue with this tape being defined in a storage pool ... but maybe I'm wrong about that. We have a half dozen or so storage pools that our scratch tapes can get assigned to. As a side note, I have tapes on my "q vol" report which were written to last in 2003. Shouldn't those tapes age off that report if the backup copy group variable "Versions Data Exists" is set to 180? Any help would be greatly appreciated. I'm about to enter panic mode as I see the number of usable tapes in my library dwindle. As always, thank you, Chris Hund Tivoli/Unix Admin Fiserv Health
