BackupExec 2012, use of media sets

You got to make sure that there are sufficient overwritable tapes in the targeted Media Set BEFORE the start of your jobs. Otherwise BE will take tapes from other media sets. You can use partitions to prevent this, but your jobs will fail from a lack of overwritable tapes

BE has never worked like that customer describes (they may have been lucky but the design will not guarantee that operation - without using partitions anyway). The admin guide going back multiple versions clearly states that when looking for overwriteable media, in the sequeunce of how the choice of tape to use is made, one of the options is always "recyclable media in any media set" and if this choice is the first available that returns an overwriteble tape, then it will move the tape between sets and overwrite it.

You can change the decision order (all documented in the admin guide) but cannot remove this choice.

 

Your other option is to create a partition for the monthly tapes, one for the weekly tapes etc and then target the jobs to the partitions. This is because tapes cannot be moved between partitions (there are some negatives to this as it is more likely that a job won't be able to find any tape to use and will be waiting for media insert or have failed when you check it the next day)

 

BTW as maximising tape use in BE 2012 is very difficult due to the one job per server model I would recommend you move to 2014 or 15 ASAP. Note: this will not affect your actual question as media sets do work the same in every version, this point is to do with Single Server Jobs and the extra complexity of dealing with the appends to get data on the same tape.