Manage 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 (TSM) 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 may 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 may 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.

• Add media
  Before you can perform saves using Backup, Recovery and Media Service, you need to add media to the BRMS inventory and initialize it. This process allows you to use the media for your save operations.
• Work with media
  Once media is added to the BRMS inventory, you can view that media based on criteria that you specify, such as the volume name, status, media pool, or expiration date.
• Reclaim your media
  You can use Backup, Recovery and Media Service (BRMS) to efficiently reuse old fragmented tape volumes by copying active file sequences to unused media.
• Create a move policy
  As part of your backup plan, you need to manage media protection and rotation. Using Backup, Recovery and Media Services (BRMS), you can create move policies to manage media movement.
• Verify a move
  By creating a move policy, you can optionally choose to have BRMS automatically verify media movement or you can choose to manually verify the move.
• Manage containers
  You can also manage containers, which is any holder that stores multiple media volumes, with Backup, Recovery and Media Services (BRMS).
• Manage locations
  You can use move policies to define the movement of media between storage locations and the length of time that the media stays in each location.