> If you twin remotely and locally, how does the restores work? Do you > have to code to just use the local drives for that?
If you do it the "official" way (channel extension to remote drives and simultaneous twinning), VM:Backup records the data on two (or more) unique volsers in parallel, and records all the volsers in the backup catalog and associates the volumes with VM:Backup in VM:Tape. Any of the volumes is acceptable, so it will try them all sequentially (if vol A is not available, tape operator responds to VMTAPE that the tape is destroyed, and it automagically switches to the next one. Seamless to the end user.) This saved my proverbial posterior several times when a careless operator (the cause of the legendary RICSTP666E error message for some of the old Rice utilities) dropped one of the volumes. If you've bit-copied the tapes (including labels), then you just substitute the copy for the real thing, and again, no user-visible impact (but you better be *dead* sure that copy job runs reliably). VM:Tape and VM:Backup can't really tell as long as the block counts are right and the data is in the right place on the volume. More risk than I'm really comfortable with, since I don't have VM:Backup source. -- db
