Hercules: Media Upgrade and Export

The media upgrade screen is used to upgrade and manage foreign and legacy media. This screen allows the user to upgrade data from an older media type to a more advanced tape. Newer tapes have larger storage capacity and faster read/write speeds. This allows the user to consolidate tapes and be able to access their data more quickly and efficiently than before.

Legacy Media is defined by any media that has an older media type that any being used by the current media series creation rules. These legacy media are only the tapes that are local to the system and have the same three letter prefix as the current location reported by RemoteDB. Additionally legacy media will not include CDs or removable disks.

Foreign Media are any media that has a different three letter prefix than the current location as reported by RemoteDB. This will include CDs and removable disk drives.

Media can be sorted and filtered out using the legend. The legend displays status and colour combinations that will be shown for each media in the gird. Here is also where the user can select what type of media they want to view, “Foreign Tapes” or “Legacy Tapes”. The media grid can be further filtered down by using the text filter. This filter works by displaying all media where the substring is present in the media name.

The media grid displays all tapes that match the filter and text search settings specified in the legend. The information displayed on the grid is as follows. Media Name, Upgrade Status, an Action Buttion, Restore Progress bar, Archive Progress Bar, Number of files on the Media, Number of the files on that media that have been upgraded, and lastly the Media Names of the locations where the files are upgraded.

The status column can display “Unknown”, “Checked”, “Running”, “Complete”, “Creating”, or “Checking” as can be seen in the legend. Each status is associated with its own color so each media’s status can immediately be identified at a glance.

The action button can display “Check”,”Create Upgrade Job”, or “Re-Check”. These button labels are determined by the current status of the Media and will perform the action listed on the button.

The “Check” button will retrieve infromation from the PriorityEngine about the number of files on the media, if those files have already been upgraded, and if so where those files are located.  

“Create Upgrade Job” will create job and start the process of restoring and then archiving all the data using current active media series and media series rules. After the job has been created the media status is updated to “Running” and the progress bars will start showing how the restore and archive jobs are progressing.  

After an upgrade job is done processing the media’s status will be changed to “complete” and the action button changes to “Re-Check”. This button is used to double check that all files have been completely upgraded.