9 track reel tapes

From: Gene Ehrich <gehrich_at_tampabay.rr.com>
Date: Mon Sep 29 13:10:39 2003

At 05:09 PM 9/29/2003 +0100, you wrote:
>They are actually Write Permit Rings - ie need to be in place to write to a
>tape.

That reminds me of a true story from my days as an IBM Systems Engineer.

I had a small account that ran CICS on a 9370 or 4370 (don't remember
which) IBM Computer. I was always bugging him to start doing a back up and
also storing it off site. He called me one day to say the system had
crashed and needed to be restored and was going home to get the weekly
backup. I said great you are backing up and storing it offsite. He said
there was one problem, the ICCF Library backup was bad on that backup but
they backed that up every day and the tape was already in the shop. ICCF
was the source code library. He asked me to come over and help if needed.

When I got there they had already restored the system tape and were ready
to restore the ICCF libraries from the daily backup. I went in to see the
systems programer to help him with a CICS problem and the DP manager came
running in to say that the operator had goofed and had told the system
backup instead of restore. I told him no problem as long as you didn't have
the ring in the tape you were safe. He said we always keep the ring in the
tapes otherwise we cannot find them when we need them but the backup only
ran for a few seconds when we aborted it.

I told him that the tape may not now be recoverable due to record length
and placement and we can then use the previous days backup and only lose a
few files. He said thats a problem since we always backup on the same tape.
I said if we cannot recover this tape what do we lose. He said all of the
source code that has been created at the company for the past eleven years.
My immediate thought was I wonder if his resume is up to date.

I won't go into the details but was able to finally recover the tape for
him and for years he was my biggest fan.



=================================
Gene Ehrich
gehrich_at_tampabay.rr.com
Received on Mon Sep 29 2003 - 13:10:39 BST