Backup to disk failing - No appendable media

[BackupPlans]

Hello,

I am running Backup Exec 2010.

I am currently backing up to removable 1TB hard disks and am rotating them on a daily basis.

The intention is to backup until the disks are full and then the job should overwrite the oldest jobs.

The result being I should have 5 disks full of backup data.

I noticed that the drives are not becoming full  but insted they are overwriting.

I altered the job to append only (was previously set to overwrite and append).

The job has failed (saying unable no appednable media to be mounted) eventhough the disk is approx 50% full.

The Max size of backup to disk files is set to 5GB (I notice the best practise suggests 4GB).

My drive is showing as having no appendable media (all backup to disk files are full) even though there is 500GB of free space on the drive.

So I assume backup exec has not been able to find any appendable backup to disk file and rather than create a new one it has terminated.

Does anyone know of a solution to this problem?

Or is this how backup Exec should work and what I am trying to acheive impossible.

Thanks in advance for your time.

[Kiran_Bandi]

BE will not create a new media, when you choose Append Only. It is not recommended to Append disk backups. Design proper media rotation strategy according to the backup dat size, but not like fill the disks completely and then overwrite. 

[BackupPlans]

Hi Kiran,

Thanks for quick reply.

I would usually have the job set to overwrite and append. However, under these circumstances I believe the job would have overwritten a previous media set as opposed to creating a new one.

When you say design proper media rotation - do mean alter the overwrite and append dates? As I believe this issue will still occurr?

Thanks again

[Kiran_Bandi · Accepted solution]

When you say design proper media rotation - do mean alter the overwrite and append dates

Yes... 

Earlier you could have used "Append to media, Overwrite if no Appendable media is found" option with less/no append period. Which resulted in overwriting backup data.

If i were you i will configure it in the following way. 

If the disk is capable of having a month of backup data (consider 90% of disk size while calculating this), configure media sets with 30 days OPP and 0 hours AP. COnfigure jobs to Append only and select media management setting as Overwrtie Recyclable media in target media set before overwriting SCRATCH meida. 

Change the numbers according to your backup data sizes, frequency you run them and frequency you use the disks.

This BLOG also might help.