BE2010 R3: Media view not refreshing?

[MIXIT]

I'm fairly new to BE and am going through the 2200 page admin guide for it.  I'm in the section relating to mdia managemtn, (pages range around 200+).  It discusses how when under the Media section in BE, if you go to Online media it'll show you want's online.  My problem is this:

On a live server with BE, with a single LTO5 tape drive, the Online media view only shows the last tape that was used for last night's backup, even though the onsite user has already swapped in today's tape to be used for tonight's backup.  If I choose Refresh from the View menu, nothing changes.  If I look in Offline media, i see all the tapes that have ever been used (so far only about 9 or 10 since this is a new setup) but I don't think that's where I should look to find the tape that's currentlin in the drive. 

Is there a simple way to just "look" at what's currently in the drive? 

To extend this a bit, and perhaps the guide will show this soon, but how do I associated a tape with scratch media?  Actually i think I know the answer, you just hvae to right click the tape and tell it which media set to go with, problem is of coruse I can't get a real-time view of the current tape in the drive thus can't select it to associate. 

Thank you! 

[AmolB · Accepted solution]

You need to perform an inventory of the tape drive, after inventory is over BE will show the properties

of the media which is in the drive

[CraigV]

Hi,

What I do is schedule an Inventory job if the tape will be changed nightly.

Configure a normal Inventory job, but check the Schedule section of the job itself. You can configure how often it must run, and when.

I normally leave it for 10 minutes before the job starts, and have made sure that the site engineers change tapes long before that.

Thanks!

[pkh]

If you have set up the OPP correctly, the tape should be overwriteable when you need to use it.  As such, you don't have to associate a tape with the scratch media set before using it.

[MIXIT]

Beore I even knew what an OPP or append period was, or how to do backup jobs properly in BE, I had been using a new blank tape each time to do my testing.  At the time I hadn't understood that the OPP template of 4 weeks for write protection meant that after 4 weeks it would auto-free itself.  So I had a half dozen or so tapes I wasn't able to re-use.  So I just realized I can put them in scratch and that'll make them available again right away (pretending for a momemt that the 4 weeks hadn't already expired). 

But yeah, each new tape I put into the backup jobs (one job is for daily and weekly reccyclable media, the 2nd job is for monthly/annual non-overwritable media), it associates the tape to the media set the job uses (or something like that anyway, I'm still getting used to this). 

I'll have to look into that Inventory job idea CraigV mentioned as it would be handy to actually see what's in the drive, not what was in on the backup from the day prior.  Thanks guys! 

[AmolB]

At the time I hadn't understood that the OPP template of 4 weeks for write protection meant that after 4 weeks it would auto-free itself

4 weeks of overwrite protection means the data on the tape will be protected for 4 weeks, once the 

period is over tape will be ready to be overwritten during next backup operation.