Why is Recycle not emptying the input tapes?

Products

• Vtape Virtual Tape System

Issue/Introduction

I ran Recycle and it read five tapes and wrote one. When I checked the five input tapes in the tape management systems, they still have active data sets on them. Why were the tapes not completely copied?

Environment

Vtape

Resolution

Each Vtape VTS Group is automatically broken down into three Subgroups by parameters in the Group Definitions in the VTGROUP PARMLIB member. The three subgroups are Short, Medium, and Long. The parameters are ShortRetention, MediumRetention, CatalogedManagedSubgroup, NeverExpireSubgroup, and SpecialRetentionSubgroup.

Data sets with retention equal to or less than the ShortRetention value are assigned to the Short Subgroup. Data sets with retention greater than the ShortRetention and less than or equal to the MediumRetention value are assigned to the Medium Subgroup. Data sets with retention greater than the MediumRetention value are assigned to the Long Subgroup. Data sets using catalog control, permanent, or special retention keywords are assigned a Subgroup based on their corresponding Subgroup parameter.

These parameters are used by the Backstore Engine to assign a Subgroup when a Virtual Volume is first stacked. These parameters are used by Recycle to change the assigned Subgroup.

For example, you have ShortRetention set to 15 and MediumRetention set to 30. You write a data set to a Virtual Volume with RETPD=35. When this Virtual Volume is first stacked, it will be assigned to the Long Subgroup. If Recycle processes the Backstore Tape six days later, the Virtual Volume only has 29 days of retention left and will be reassigned to the Medium Subgroup.

The reason the Backstore Tapes were not completely copied is because you do not have the SUBGROUP parameter in your Recycle commands set to an asterisk to process all Subgroups. Essentially the Recycle job made one pass through the five input tapes and copied only the specified Subgroup to the output tape.

Since Subgroups are never mixed on an output tape, specifying SUBGROUP(*) in your Recycle commands could result in three output tapes. There could be one tape for the Short Subgroup Virtual Volumes, one tape for the Medium Subgroup Virtual Volumes, and one tape for the Long Subgroup Virtual Volumes.