Add partition and drive to Storage Pool

[DaneJ]

Hi

I'm having issues configuring partitions and drives in a storage pool. There seems to be only an option to add the complete tape-drive and no partitions. I cant find how to combine these in documentation or online. Please help me solve this or find a "final" soloution so that i can stop thinking about this

Available Drives

• Robotic Library
  • 8 Slots
  • 1 Internal TAPE drive LTO-6
• Tape drive (external) LTO-4

What i want to do

Combine Tape (external) and a Robotic Slots 1-4 in a Storagepool.

TIA

DaneJ

[Colin_Weaver]

We almost certainly have not designed Backup Exec to be able to do that as partitioning is usually used to isolate one or more jobs to specific tapes, which setting up a pool of partitions would defeat and you would be better off just not having a partition at all

If your reason for doing this is you want to primarily use the partiton in the library but have the stand alone tape as an overflow for if you don't have enough usuable tapes in the partition, then you should really be looking at your daily processes for checking media needed for backups and/or look at when you overwrite tapes (as appends are often the cause of running out of space) and/or consider either not using partitons at all or making the partition 1 slot larger.

If you are starting to hit the limits of your 8 slot library then the next option is to invest in a larger library that either takes grater capacity tapes of has more slots available (or both)

[DaneJ]

---

@Colin_Weaver wrote:

We almost certainly have not designed Backup Exec to be able to do that as partitioning is usually used to isolate one or more jobs to specific tapes, which setting up a pool of partitions would defeat and you would be better off just not having a partition at all

---

Thanks for the answer. As I understand now, this is not a feature of BE. This should idealy be a new feature in the coming release. BE needs to start thinking out of the box when it comes to backup solutions and different customers needs and economics.

---

@Colin_Weaver wrote:

If your reason for doing this is you want to primarily use the partiton in the library but have the stand alone tape as an overflow for if you don't have enough usuable tapes in the partition, then you should really be looking at your daily processes for checking media needed for backups and/or look at when you overwrite tapes (as appends are often the cause of running out of space) and/or consider either not using partitons at all or making the partition 1 slot larger.

---

Well, yes and no. The intendeed need was to utilize the external tape drive (which fits 95% of our needs) but use the partition for having a tape buffer in case an appended backup doesnt fit. This can sometimes happen if the full backup gets canceled, then the append job will increase not to fit on the external tape media.

I also prefer to have non-tech-savvy users access the external drive compared to issueing commands on the robot to relase tapes.

There is also a optional use of Pooled Partitions. If a customer with limited budget buys a second robot then you can setup 2 (or more) partitions on both drives and get hardware redundancy within the partitions. Ex Pool1 = DriveApart1+DriveBpart1 and Pool2=DriveApart2+DriveBpart2.

---

@Colin_Weaver wrote:

If you are starting to hit the limuts of your 8 slot library then the next option is to invest in a larger library that either takes grater capacity tapes of has more slots available (or both)

---

Or the option above :D

//DaneJ

[Larry_Fine]

---

@DaneJ wrote:

Well, yes and no. The intendeed need was to utilize the external tape drive (which fits 95% of our needs) but use the partition for having a tape buffer in case an appended backup doesnt fit. This can sometimes happen if the full backup gets canceled, then the append job will increase not to fit on the external tape media.

---

A pool is a pool, not a failover system.  What I mean is that if you put multiple device in a pool, BE 'randomly' decides which device to use when a backup starts.  So, roughly 50% of your backups would go to the stand-alone tape drive and 50% to the library, unless you are meticulous about very tight media set rules and media handling.  and heaven forbid that something doesn't go as planned and the non tech-savy person takes the wrong tapes out.

Pooling whole libraries makes sense to me.  Pooling stand-alone drives makes sense to me.  Mixing stand-alone drives and part of a library just sounds too brittle & complicated to me.  Just my opinion...