Tape Integrity Matters

Imagine that it’s 4 a.m. and the operator gets a message saying “Active files exist on tape volume 660054-reply C, I, R, D” Do they call you, the operations manager, or do they decide they know what to do? Maybe they’ve seen this message before and were trained by the previous night operator that the correct response is “I” because, “The backups keep running and you don’t have to wake up the manager in the middle of the night.”

Well the “I” response certainly keeps the backup running. Unfortunately, they just wrote over a tape with unexpired data on it. Did you still need the data? Maybe it was yesterday’s backup on another partition. Who put the volume in the scratch pool to begin with? Why are operators making these decisions?

This type of thing happens all too often on IBM i servers and often no one knows that it’s happening. When was the last time you audited your backups? Who looks through QSYSOPR or QHST to see whether your team is responding to these events correctly? Unfortunately, many tools don’t do a good job of stopping your operator from overwriting tapes containing unexpired data.

Robot/SAVE provides tape integrity across all IBM i partitions and servers, and writes the actual expiration date on the tape. Robot/SAVE won’t overwrite the tape and won’t give an operator the option to write over a tape with unexpired data on it. And, if you have an automated tape-loading device (ATL), Robot/SAVE won’t let it mount a tape containing unexpired data. Robot/SAVE honors the data on your tapes.

You can’t afford to risk valuable backups with inaccurate expiration dates—Robot/SAVE has helped customers avoid this problem for years.