Backup Exec 10d - Tape rotation

[mshapiro]

Hi,

I'm having an issue with tape rotation with Backup Exec.  I have a media set with three tapes in it that I'm using for weekly full and daily incremental jobs.  When a tape fills up, Backup Exec will not swap in one of the other empty tapes in the media set and the job will sit in "queued" mode forever.  I'm using an HP Autoloader G2 1/8.  Any suggestions?  Thank you in advance!

[Ken_Putnam]

Are your jobs all Append, or do you run overwite once in a while?

What is the OPP of the media set that you are writing to?  How long has it been since the tape volume was closed?

The way that APPEND works, all media in an "append family" share the same OPP date, which is reset each time that the latest volume is closed

[mshapiro]

This media set is brand new, so far only one tape out of three have been written to.  The OPP is "Infinite - Don't Allow Overwrite" and the Append period is "Infinite - Allow Append."

I don't know what you mean by closing a tape volume.

[Ben_L_]

Are all your tapes in that media set?  If so move the empty / blank ones into scratch media this will allow Backup Exec to use those tapes.  Also I would suggest creating a new media set with a different Overwrite Protection Period, this will allow Backup Exec to re-use tapes instead of having to use a new / blank one everytime you need a blank tape.

[mshapiro]

We're just starting off with backing up data to tape, so all we have are blanks at this point.  At the moment the business does not want to overwrite any tapes and wants to keep everything for archiving.  We do have different media sets; I'm trying to separate out media sets so we can separate data and organize our tapes within the software and when we need to eject them for off-site storage.

[Ben_L_ · Accepted solution]

If you move the tapes into a media set before they are used they will automatically tape on the properties of that media set.  So if you media set is set to never allow overwrite, even though that tape is blank it can't be overwriten because of the media set it's been placed in.   If you move one of the blank tapes back to scratch media then run a job that is set to use the media set that doesn't allow overwrite it will pull the tape from the scratch media set and place it in the media set defined in the back up job.

[mshapiro]

Ah! So it did!!  That makes sense.  Thanks everyone for your help.