BRMS & Tape Barcode Labels

[LiQuiD_FuSioN]

Hello out there. Is there anyone familiar here with using BRMS & the kinds of barcode labels you can put on LTO tapes? Just trying to wrap my head around a few things.

We purchased a stack of standard-looking preprinted barcode labels already for our LTO 6 tapes. They have a format of "000001 L6"

They're working fine so far for our daily backups, but what if we wanted to use custom barcode labels? For example, if we do one-off tape backups or monthly backups, is there anything against us ordering a custom label? E.g. "EM1220 L6" to signify a December 2020 monthly backup tape.

My main concern is just having labels on tapes that make sense to the tape operator or we need to quickly hunt down an old monthly tape backup. Curious to see how others out there handle this. Thanks!

[john.sev99]

Using tapes labelled the way you are suggesting seems to me to be harking back to times when we didn't have tape management systems, so tapes were labelled in such a way that you'd know what to load on a given day and would work with a tape rotation policy set up. BRMS however is a tape management system and IMO you should abandon those old ideas and let BRMS take care of the management for you. This requires a mind shift but tape management systems are there to manage your backup media. Your media policies in BRMS should set the retention dates so it will expire the media when they are due to expire and release the tape into the pool for use. You can use BRMS to produce a report of available tapes which the operators can use to grab tapes from. You should run the BRMS maintenance daily to do all this. If you need to restore something from tape, you would use BRMS to do that as well (easiest from WRKMEDIBRM), it will ask for the particular tape to be loaded and restore from it. It shouldn't be hard for operators to track down a tape when a message pops up asking for volume x to be loaded.

[LiQuiD_FuSioN]

Using tapes labelled the way you are suggesting seems to me to be harking back to times when we didn't have tape management systems, so tapes were labelled in such a way that you'd know what to load on a given day and would work with a tape rotation policy set up. BRMS however is a tape management system and IMO you should abandon those old ideas and let BRMS take care of the management for you. This requires a mind shift but tape management systems are there to manage your backup media. Your media policies in BRMS should set the retention dates so it will expire the media when they are due to expire and release the tape into the pool for use. You can use BRMS to produce a report of available tapes which the operators can use to grab tapes from. You should run the BRMS maintenance daily to do all this. If you need to restore something from tape, you would use BRMS to do that as well (easiest from WRKMEDIBRM), it will ask for the particular tape to be loaded and restore from it. It shouldn't be hard for operators to track down a tape when a message pops up asking for volume x to be loaded.

You're right about it being a mind shift. It really has been quite nice having BRMS perform our automated backups using a pool of daily tapes. We don't really have to worry about what numbers are shown on the barcode label itself.

My idea for monthly backups, on the other hand, is to create a new control group, new media policy for longer retention as well as a new media class. When we go to add a new tape to the media library that's only to be used for our monthly backup, I'll add it using the new media class. The idea is that we don't pull an existing tape from our daily backup tape pool, we only pull from the new tapes we want to use. The barcode at this point won't matter much to us visually. Like my coworkers brought up, we can always place a regular old label on the plastic tape case to signify what it is when we store it away.

[john.sev99]

I'm not sure how you'll manage this if the external label of the tape doesn't match the internal label? If BRMS asks to load tape xxxxxx (which is based on the internal initialised-as volume ID), how would you locate that if the external label doesn't match?

[LiQuiD_FuSioN]

I'm not sure how you'll manage this if the external label of the tape doesn't match the internal label? If BRMS asks to load tape xxxxxx (which is based on the internal initialised-as volume ID), how would you locate that if the external label doesn't match?

I'm not sure what you mean. We're still using the barcode label itself on front of tape of course. I meant that we'll also place a little sticker on the plastic tape case when we store it away. Hopefully that clears it up.

[LiQuiD_FuSioN]

In addition, we're not going to alter the volume ID or anything like that. If we ever have to restore from our monthly backup tape, we'll use BRMS to verify the volume ID and date. Then we'll let our tape operator know to find the tape with that particular volume ID as well from storage. It'll also be nifty to have a little sticker on the plastic tape case where tape goes in to see it labeled there too. So we have two things to look for, that's all I meant.