Recovering an entire optical cartridge or tape volume

OAM contains the Volume Recovery utility that recovers the objects from an unusable optical or tape volume to a usable volume. The Volume Recovery utility is used if an optical or tape volume is rendered unreadable, either because of physical damage, or because the volume cannot be found. The Volume Recovery utility is used for two types of volume recovery:

Volumes containing primary objects belonging to an Object storage group can be recovered from the first or second backup copies of the objects (optical or tape).
Backup volumes belonging to an Object Backup storage group can be recovered from the primary copies of the objects (disk (DB2 or file system), optical, or tape). All storage groups that contain objects that need to be recovered must be defined as part of the ACDS configuration.

To recover a primary optical or tape volume, all of the backup volumes containing either the first or the second backup copies of the objects on the primary volume are needed, whether they are optical or tape. The media from which the backup copy is retrieved for the recovery depends on the volume on which the selected backup copy resides.

If you specified the DELETE option, you can delete recovered tape and optical volumes after all data on those volumes has been recovered successfully.

Example: OAM might have run one storage management cycle for the storage group after OAM was initialized with a CBROAMxx PARMLIB member that contained a particular SETOAM statement. This SETOAM statement specified a tape unit name for an Object Backup storage group that caused OAM to write backups for that group to tape. Another time, OAM might have run a storage management cycle for the storage group after OAM was initialized, and the system invoked the START OAM command with one of these three options:

Without a CBROAMxx PARMLIB member
With a CBROAMxx PARMLIB member that contained no SETOAM statements
With a SETOAM statement that did not specify a tape unit name that was associated with an Object Backup storage group

Any one of these options causes OAM to write backups to an optical volume.

When recovering a backup volume, every Object storage group must be searched for primary objects having backup copies residing on the backup volume being recovered. The primary copy for each of these objects can be on disk (DB2 or file system), optical, or tape. As a result, the Volume Recovery utility must identify the optical volumes as well as the tape volumes that are needed for recovery. If both optical and tape volume are requested for the recovery, the operator must reply that both types are available for the recovery to continue. The operator starts the recovery utility to copy the data.

The Volume Recovery operation is similar to that of Movevol, and, as such, it's performance can also be enhanced by employing the same techniques used to tune the Movevol environment. Refer to Analyzing resources and tuning OAM for MOVEVOL usage.

For more information on the Volume Recovery utility, see Starting the OAM Volume Recovery utility and Stopping a volume recovery that is in progress.