Managing your media

Backup, Recovery, and Media Services (BRMS) keeps an inventory of media and simplifies media management by tracking everything in that inventory--what pieces of information are saved where and which media have available space.

When you create your policies, you can specify the following locations for storing the save items--serial media, parallel media, save file, or Tivoli® Storage Manager server. Then, when you do a save, BRMS selects the media it needs from the available pool of that type of media. You don't have to worry about accidentally writing over active files or using an invalid piece of media because it is all tracked for you.

Once you back up your data, you can use BRMS to help you track your media as it moves through the different storage locations you define. For example, you might move your backups offsite for storage; BRMS will keep track of when the media leaves and when it is scheduled to return.

You can use the Add Media wizard to add media to BRMS and prepare it for use. You can also manually expire media, which returns it to the inventory of available media. You can also create media pools which are groupings of media based on similar characteristics, such as density or capacity. Over time, you might find that you have media that have many expired items on them and only a few active items. You can reclaim this media by moving the active items onto media that have other active items on them.