Nearing medium life

Site Administrators
1

Tapes with this alert? We are repacking them to new tapes. What do we do after the repack is completed? Do we reclaim the tape to remove the files in the recycle bin, then change the state of the tape to BROKEN or EXPORTED with a reason?

2

Dear Jeff,

I would ask: What do you plan to do with the tapes once the data has been migrated to another (newer) cartridge?

The drive/library is clearly indicating that the cartridges are at the end of their lives so I would retire them from the production.

Regarding your question about states:

  • BROKEN tapes are supposed to contain experiment files that can not be read. They are still physically located in the tape libraries. The experiment coordinators have been informed about this situation and the CTA operations wait until the files are deleted/overwritten by the experiment. Once that is done the tapes will be (logically) empty.
  • EXPORTED tapes are not supposed to be used by CTA. They could be physically removed from the libraries, but you still want to keep track / inventory in CTA that they do exist. Or they can be logically exported from production instance, but used for testing / pre-production.

Comming back to your tapes nearing medium life, I would simply reclaim them and then remove them with cta-admin tape rm from the system. Following physical export from the library, I would recommend to dispose them in environment friendly way.

Hope I answered your questions.

Vladimir Bahyl
CERN