9 track reel tapes

At 05:09 PM 9/29/2003 +0100, you wrote: 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(a)tampabay.rr.com