A full system save every week? What in the world for? Once every three to six months is more reasonable. Rotating library saves through the week makes some sense along with incrementals. Rotate perhaps like libraries A through G on Mondays; H through N on Tuesdays, etc.

Split a couple drives off as a user ASP. Use them for your journal receivers and for SAVSECDTA/SAVCFG savefiles. If you have a decent RAID configuration, cut your backups even more.

Tom

I’m a fan of BRMS – have been using it at various locations for at least 10 years – I think it is one of the better products out there – just has a bit of a learning curve to set up properly.

BRMS tracks media useage as well as read and write errors. You can set “threshold” values for the class of media you use. (Go BRMMED, option #1). You can then run the Threshold Report (Go BRMMEDACT opt#6) to see what volumes should be taken out of rotation. You can also see the usage and errors using the Work with Media command (GO BRMMED opt#2 or WRKMEDBRM) and pressing F11 a couple of times on list screen. However, I don’t think that BRMS will actually mark the volumes as unusuable. You have to run the reports and then eject the unusuable volumes.

Here are a few ideas to look at..

You didn’t say what error message you were getting, but if there is a response that will tell BRMS to try another volume you could set that up in the system reply list. Assuming you have enough expired volumes in the library it should work.

If you have multiple drives in your tape silo you might be able to run parallel backups. BRMS will handle that and decide what to put where. That will not get around bad media, but it will considerable speed up your backup.

lastly, if you have the DASD space, consider backing up to another ASP or even to save files. Then run your tape backup during the day.

Regards
Mike

Have you tried initializing the tapes on another (compatible) drive?

Regards,

Martin Gilbert.