Remote Storage Service Has No Option to Reclaim Media After Removing a Volume from Management

Remote Storage Service (RSS) allocates media (tape) as needed to store migrated files, and to make media copies. The media that RSS allocates is never made available for other programs to use even after you use RSS to remove a volume from management.

This behavior occurs primarily because RSS does not migrate files from different managed volumes to separate or different tapes. In addition, RSS does not keep a list of volumes from which it has migrated files for each specific piece of master media. Consequently, RSS has no reclaiming or tape recycling mechanism to free a tape from allocation.

You can view RSS master media in the RSS graphical user interface (GUI) under the Media icon. All master and copy media that is allocated to RSS is located in the Removable Storage Manager (RSM) GUI in the Remote Storage media pool.

It is possible to use RSM to make the media available for use by other programs. This is not recommended or supported by Microsoft and you should only do this if you do not have any valid files on the RSS media that you want to reclaim (for example, if you unmanaged all volumes, and then chose to recall all copied files from Remote Storage).

To reclaim media using RSM, follow these steps:

1. Right-click the piece of Remote Storage media you want to reclaim. Click All Tasks, and then click Deallocate.
   
   You then receive the following warning:
   [Confirm Media Deallocation]
   Deallocating media without the knowledge of the owning application can cause the data on it to be lost.
   
   Are you sure you want to deallocate the selected item?
2. Click Yes twice to confirm.

The media is now free for other programs to use and RSM shows the status as available. Remote Storage shows the deallocated master media as missing until all media copies of that piece of master media are also deallocated or deleted. Remote Storage ignores the missing media and does not try to migrate to it or make media copies for it. However, the deallocated media remains in the Remote Storage media table, and is listed if you run the Windows Support Tools utility RsDiag.exe /s command. Also, the Remote Storage media serial numbering continues to grow as new media is allocated to Remote Storage. Remote Storage never again uses the old deallocated media name, RS-Machine_Name-# (where # is the serial number), as a media label.

Warning: You cannot open files from deallocated media. If you have data in an offline file that is on the deallocated media, Remote Storage views this data as missing.

If you try to open a file after the Remote Storage media containing the file is deallocated, you may receive an error message from the program attempting to open the file and Remote Storage posts the following warning messages in the application event log: Remote Storage media is compatible with the Windows 2000 backup utility (NTBackup.exe), and you can restore files manually if the deallocated Remote Storage media has not been prepared or claimed and overwritten by another program.