Forum Discussion

cwalker95's avatar
cwalker95
Level 2
2 months ago

Tape is not appendable despite having alot of free space available.

I am new to BackupExec but we are running into an issue with our tapes. We have a few servers doing a full backup to disk once a week, then the full backup gets duplicated to tape. When the Duplicate job comes up, it prompts to insert over writable media instead of just appending to the existing tape. So far only 2.4TB is used of 8TB available however, it will not append.

The OPP is set to one year and the APP is set to Infinite allow append. So I don't know what would be blocking the append. Do the disk backups have to be in the same media set as the tape backups? Currently, backups on the disk are only protected for 1 week whereas they are protected for 1 year on tape. Let me know if there is more info needed.

tape
  • DPeaco's avatar
    DPeaco
    Moderator
    2 months ago

    cwalker95 

    I assume that you are using an SLP to duplicate the data from disk to tape?

    Windows or Linux/Unix?

    Version of software running on your master server?
    Media server used for the backup MSDP pool?
    The more details you provide, the better we can help with this.

  • gschwarzingram's avatar
    gschwarzingram
    Level 2
    2 months ago

    Please, be carefull with too long append-periods: with infinite you'll never know, when the overwrite protection timeframe will really start = difficult to manage/reuse/... 

    Use more media and a short append period to gain control. The default media recycling rules of BE prefer media from scratch-pool, i would recommend to change it to recyclable (link below, figure 3). as long as a write-to-tape- job starts within the defined append period, it will run (until job finishes or tape is full).

    A good explanation of Append/Overwrite: have look at figure 3 for defaults (prefer recycle!!) https://www.veritas.com/support/en_US/article.100017917