Howdy, So just to add to the confusion.......... I got paged by the 987 last Saturday night (which is what I get for teaching it to do so) because the backups ran out of tape. Ok so I blearily stuffed a couple of 120m tapes into the DDS II drives and went my un-merry way. So now in checking back I find that Vstore failed because the RESTORESET option is invalid for MPEv media. Interesting only because we don't have any CM 120m tapes! After enough floundering about I found that one of the two tapes was a tar tape from a Unix box. So......the STORE completed succesfully by writting to only tape one of the two in parallel but VESTORE choked on tape two before even starting the verify. FYI Jim (muddled morning) Trudeau Central Computing Services of Abu Dabi