Choosing which tapes to pull for offsite storage
I hope this isn't a silly question. I recently took over as Sys admin and still learning the ropes. Is there an easy way to determine which tapes for a previous month to remove from the library and take to an offsite storage. Give a little clarification. We do daily incrementals and weekly full backups. At the beginning of each new month, we would pull tapes for the previous month backup for offsite storage. The previous Sys Admin told me to look at the library slots and whatever slot had black text, remove for offsite storage.
Problem that he encountered was sometimes when doing a restore from a past month, BE would need a tape from another month that was pulled. Example, trying to do a restore from March 2022 tapes, BE would need a tape from April or Feb. My thinking is his way was not very accurate in figuring out which tapes needed to be pulled.
I hope this makes some sense and any suggestions are welcomed.
So you are creating a Custom report that will certainly show you what you need, though as you've seen these can get quite complex quite quickly.
One alternative would be to look at using Vaults. When you create your Media Set, create a new Vault first.and get the Media Set to use that vault. My reasoning here (because it could be argued this is over-complicating things) is that you can simply run one of the standard reports that are pre-setup. eg Media - "Move Media to Vault" (to show 'what media should be moved to a vault')
Refer to the admin guide (Tape Storage chapter) for more info https://www.veritas.com/content/support/en_US/doc/59226269-152612234-1Or have you tried the "Recently Written Media" standard report rather than creating a custom one?
There are a lot of options/filters available within reports, and are no additional add-ins available (3rd-party or Veritas ones) as far as I know.
