I have an ongoing and persistent problem where Backup Exec 2014 (and previous versions) jump media sets AND tape sets all the time. Not only does this frustrate me in that the appropriate media is available, but it destroys a tape sets I may potentially need. I run full backups, no incremental or differential backups so my media is always set to overwrite whenever the tape set is freed by the media set's retainage policy.
For example, I have the standard daily/weekly/monthly media sets with tape sets of five tapes each. I have this issue where the weekly backup will for no reason, grab a daily tape that is loaded in the library. The daily tape is assuredly set for overwrite but the point is, the weekly tapes from that particular tape set are ALSO available and have an older overwrite date that the dailies. Last week, the weekly grabbed weekly tape 1, then grabbed a daily, proceeded on to weekly tape 3,4 and 5, leaving weekly tape 2 behind!!!
Today, my daily fired as usual. For whatever reason, the backup started with tape 2, even though tape one was older. It then jumped the tape set and took tape 1 out of tape set 2 -- screwing up TWO of my dailies.
I have even tried temporarily retiring all the media in the library EXCEPT for the five tapes the job is supposed to use and the software actually with "unretire" a tape and use it. This behavior happens when the "retired" tape is a new tape. I generally will not leave it in scratch because no matter what, the job will grab scratch tapes before other tapes. Because of this problem, I can't even leave it assigned to a media set either.
This behavior is really bugging me and I've posted about this before. Before you begin saying it has something to do with retainage, or setting the media to overwrite instead of append. I've been there done that and this issue just starts for no reason. It may work fine for three months, then over a course of two or three weeks, the software completely obliterates my tape sets.
Thanks, Bruce
