BE keeps using the wrong tape from a media set.

[Support-mcc]

I have BE 2010 R2 setup with MONTHLY, WEEKLY, & DAILY media pools.  Have the default (system created) jobs.

What happens is the "tape monitor user" forgets to be in the correct tape on Friday (which is are Monthly or Weekly jobs) and on Monday assumes the Friday job is complete changes tapes to a DAILY tape.  In which BE starts writing to that tape and moves it to the MONTHLY or WEEKLY media set.

Shouldn't it NOT use that tape as it is in the DAILY set?  What am I not doing corectly? 

[CraigV]

Hi there,

If the tape is either in the scratch set, or overwritable, it doesn;'t matter what set it previously belonged too. It will be overwritten.

If you have an autoloader/library, you can look at partitioning your slots into Daily, Weekly & Monthly slots. This will allow better control over your tapes.

Laters!

[Ken_Putnam]

Shouldn't it NOT use that tape as it is in the DAILY set?  What am I not doing corectly?

it is a design decision that I tend to agree with on the one hand, and disagree with on the other

Letting a job sit while overwriteable tape is available does seem kind of wasteful, but the problem of tapes moving between media sets can really screw things up

{shrug}  It is what it is 

As Craig suggested, partition the loader and point you jobs to the appropriate partiion, and this problem goes away (until someone loads the tapes into the wrong slots, of course  )

[pkh]

For me, writing to a tape from a different media set is preferable to having the job failed because there is nothing for it to write to.  This is what would happen when partition are used.  BE will not take a tape from another partition even if it is available.

[Colin_Weaver]

PKH's comment above is why we move tapes between media sets - we took a descision in the design on the product that most customers agree with in that if a backup jobs is scheduled to start - it should use all available options to find a target media to use before the job is marked as a fail - this therefore includes Overwriteable Media in a different media set from that defined in the jobs.

Basically it boils down to "Do you want a backup failure or do you want a slight annoyance of media being moved to a different set?"

Note: The Media Management information in our admin guide does show that all options for configuring media sets would go to a different media set,  and as others have answered the only way to stop this behaviour is to parttion the library - and target the jobs to partitions. The reason this has an effect is that each parttion is seen as a single logical device and although Backup Exec can move media from different media sets in a job, it can't move them between devices. Obviously this configuration will mean that failures due to no media available are likely to be more frequent.

[CraigV]

Hi,

Any news here?