Duplicate to tape jobs tape handling

[BackupAdminHCC]

We are testing a new setup with jobs that are set up to duplicate to tape immediately after the full backup to disk job completes. How does Backup Exec handle the tapes in the library? Will it use the same tape that a previous job used assuming it has sufficient capacity or will it pull in another tape? Also, if all tape drives are in use when another duplicate to tape job runs, does it get queued or does it fail? Thanks.

[LegAEI]

1. Which tapes are used are part of the media settings in the job. Make sure you allocate the tapes in your library to the media set you want to write to, then select that media set in the job. After choosing the media set, set the overwrite settings to what you want. If you want to just keep writing as jobs go, de-select the eject after job completes option and make sure you are appending to the tape. If you have your media settings set to use scratch instead of overwrite, it will pull in a new tape instead of trying to overwrite to the current tape.

2. If the drives are in use, tape jobs queue. This is for both a library and a single slot tape writer. You can set fault tolerance times for this in the job settings.

[BackupRecover]

Hi,

If you want BE to use the same tape as used by previous duplicate job, there needs to be 2 settings in place

A) All duplicate jobs need to have the same media set selected (media set ensures how long you want to retain the data that is written to the tape). We can’t put a tape into more than one media set in other words we can’t have more than one retention applied to one tape.

B)The jobs need to have “append to media, overwrite if no appendable media is available” selected

As stated above by LegAEI the job will remain in queue if drive is busy writing and resume once the tape is available.

Let us know if it helped.

Thank you!