Recycling Methods

You initiate recycling by entering the sam-recycler command either manually or through a cron job. The following table shows the recycling methods.

Table 16-2 Recycling Methods and Media Types

Before configuring the recycler, note the following:

• Directives in the archiver.cmd file control recycling by archive set.

  Directives in the recycler.cmd file control recycling by library. In addition, the recycler.cmd file controls general recycler behavior. For information about recycler directives, see Creating a recycler.cmd File.

• Do not recycle volumes that contain removable media files. You create removable media files by using the request(1) command. A volume with removable media files can never be drained.

• Do not run the recycler while performing maintenance on a file system. The recycler uses the .inodes file and the mcf file to determine whether files are current or expired and to identify the devices associated with a file system. Absence of proper information in the .inodes and mcf files can cause current archived data to appear as expired and be recycled.

• All file systems must be mounted when the recycler is run. If you are recycling from an online disk, the file system that contains the disk volumes must be mounted and the host system must be accessible.

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Caution - Take extreme care when configuring the recycler if you are using disk archiving in an environment with multiple SAM-QFS servers. The diskvols.conf file for each SAM-QFS server must point to a unique set of disk archiving target directories. If any of these directories are shared by different SAM-QFS servers, running the recycler from one SAM-QFS server will destroy the disk archive data that is managed by the other SAM-QFS server.

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