I just took over the Backup Exec environment and had a simple question about tapes and rotating them through the system. We do a monthly backup and those tapes are kept for 2 years per our retention rules. So I have older tapes that are cycling out of the retention period that I would like to reuse.
For the backups we use a Monthly backup media set. What would be the best operation for reusing these tapes in the monthly backup media set?
Maybe a second part to this question, If there is no media in the Month end media set will the month end job run with tapes from the Scratch media set?
Yes, as long you have tapes available in scratch.
General suggestion:
Have always one or two tapes available in scratch because of this exact scenario or if all of a sudden the amount of data which you are backing up changes and does no longer fit onto the provided tapes in the target media set, then again BE will take a tape out of scratch and continue with the backup.
You don't have to do anything special. Just use them when they expire.
I would suggest that you read the Tape Management chapter of the Admin Guide for more information.
