I have heard it often of TSM administrators wondering why the TSM reclamation process is slow & clumsy process. The good part most of these administrators is that they understand the importance of reclamation & how it help their backup become more efficient & save on tapes, though they still wonder why it takes too longs. I had decided to give my point of view on this.

1- One of the main reasons for the reclamation process to be slow is that you don’t have enough tape drives. If you have only one tape drive into your library then you can have a seriously slow & none efficient reclamation process, as each time you need to reclaim a tape, TSM will have to copy the full tape to the disk, then reclaim the volume on the disk to another tap. So you are basically repeating the reclamation process twice.