Choose a vaulting strategy that uses simple rules based on days and a limited number of different vaulting criteria.
Business Value:
Choosing a simple vaulting strategy based on days (days since creation or days at the vault) allows you to easily monitor the movement of tapes to off-site locations (vaults) and prevents tapes from being accidentally left at the vault longer than required.
Additional Considerations:
The rules for automated off-site movement of tapes are defined in the Vault Pattern Description Data Set (VPD). While very specific rules can be defined in the VPD for an individual volume or tape data set using the VOL= or CDSN= selection statements, the most efficient way to do selection is to set up patterns using data set name (DSN) rules.
Data sets matching the explicit or pattern-masked data set rules will be selected for processing by VMS. Having fewer rules using pattern masking allows for easier control and prevents having obsolete entries that should be removed.
Tapes sent off-site can generally be placed into two categories. The first category includes tapes sent off-site for DR purposes (full-volume backups and incremental backups). The second category is long-term backups.
For this category, use a rule-based on days since creation or days in the vault. It is best to keep everything at the vault the same length of time. Why you should keep some full-volume backups for 3 weeks and others for 4 weeks? They are all obsolete the next time a full volume backup is run. When setting this up, choose how many copies you want to keep off-site. If two is sufficient and you run full-volume backups once a week, then keeping DR backups off-site for 14 days is sufficient. If you only do full-volume backups every two weeks, then keep those DR backups off-site for 28 days.
For this category, keep the tapes at off-site either permanently or until they are expired. However, permanently keeping the tapes at off-site does not mean the data will be available forever; as tapes that are kept longer than 7 years may not be able to be read. Keeping the tapes at off-site until they are expired causes a file to expire accidentally and brings back the tape from the vault too early.
Note: For more information about VMS utilities, see the Utilities and Reports Reference Guide.
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