Backup Exec Append/Overwrite/Eject questions

[Talonluck]

Hi all, I'm hoping to get some help with this. I've just recently started work with a company who uses backup exec 10x and I'm trying to figure things out.

Currently we run 8 backup jobs a night for the 8 different servers we backup. They're all differential backups. Before I started, they were running pretty smooth under the guy who left, now I seem to be unable to have these jobs run stable.

My issue seems to be that the jobs that run attempt to append first to the backup tapes. Once the tape is full from the append, it doesn't switch over to overwrite and instead locks the tape with overwrite protection and ejects it. This seems to happen rather often and I'm not sure how to force the overwrite to occur after the append. Any help would be greatly appreciated as noone else in the company knows and the guy who set it up does not work here any longer.

Thanks in advance! Also, if I need to supply other info, I can do so.

[Ken_Putnam]

once BackupExec has written to a tape and filled it up, it will not overwrite in the same job, since that will effectively delete the first part of the job

What is the OPP for the media set that the job(s) write to?  (Overwrite Protection Period - From the media tab, right click the media set\properties)

Normally, when one appends daily backups, there is also a weekly that does an Overwrite, so that periodically the tapes are Overwritten so they don't fill up.

How many jobs run each night?

Do you have any overwrite jobs at all?

Standalone drives or loader/library?

[Talonluck]

The OPP is set to 1 day. We're on a Monday, Wednesday, Friday tape switch with jobs running every night but saturday and sunday.

8 jobs run each night. The last time these jobs ran the sizes were as follows.
8,158,967,798
26,618,924,680
104,021,423,470
56,085,484,445
11,923,260,559
4,981,561,140
1,139,229,089
39,748,663,309

Tape size are 200gig Native, 400gig Compressed I believe we're using hardware compression.

All jobs are set to:
When this job begins, Append to media, overwrite if no appendable media is available.

This is a standalone drive, single media at a time.

Wouldn't backup exec pull the backup size before it starts appending to the tape to make sure that there is enough room for an append? Thanks for your quick reply and any help you can give!

[Ken_Putnam]

Wouldn't backup exec pull the backup size before it starts appending to the tape to make sure that there is enough room for an append?

Nope, as long as the tape is in the same media set, and the volume is still within the OPP period, it will accept it

the 8 jobs total ~ 218GB, and I generally use about 1.2-1.3:1 compression as  rule of thumb, so the second job ( that appends)  would run out of tape (Tues & Thurs)

Only thing I can suggest is to use a new tape every night with an OPP (overwrite protection period) of 6 days, and all jobs Overwrite