Guys and gals,
I want to try to produce some really good advice to ex SE customers on
what they should do about archiving. Some of them really have their
heads in the sand(or elsewhere) and have only purchased one tape
drive. They also want to do overnight (unattended?) backups.
I am thinking about suggesting the following:-

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

if the volume of dbspace is less than 75% of the available tape size
then use ontape otherwise use onbar and ism.

do an unattended level-0 every night.

Next morning check that the ontape or onbar has completed
satisfactorily and label the tape accordingly.

After the level-0 has completed successfully run ontape -a (or
equivalent onbar) to back up the logs for the previous day, but in
attended mode.

Use new tapes every time. It is not worth saving pounds, dollars,
euros, or whatever by recycling tapes.

Once per month do a full system restore to a disaster recovery site -
to check the integrity of the tapes and the procedures. If necessary,
if there are no errors from the disaster recovery exercise it might be
possible to reuse some old tapes (>3 months?) if they really are that
penny-pinching.

And be prepared to use the disaster recovery site to rebuild the
critical dbspaces and individual dbspaces in the event that some
person accidentally deletes the last 2 years info, or a business
process requires the reprint of paperwork based on the database
contents three months previous.

And I won't guarantee that this is foolproof. But it might give me
less headaches than I've had in the last month from 4 sites who have
been badly advised about archiving. I even saw a comment to the
effect that customers are reticent to perform the administrative work
to maintain tape libraries. And that was from a respected computer
specialist.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I appreciate that some of my grammar might be wrong, and if I've
offended anybody by my ideas then I apologise now. But I would like
some constructive criticism of this idea.

Who knows, it might even be worthy of inclusion in the FAQ.

regards

Malcolm