Erase Tape option at beginning jobs and eject at the end

[SoDakWill]

I am sure this has been asked.. I've looked at answers and haven't found a solution I like at all yet.. but here goes.

With BE 2010, I had one job that backed up my servers to disk.. then a job that overwrote my tape, and duplicated the job to that tape, then ejected the tape when done.. 

Easy enough..

(stating the obvious here). Now I have serveral jobs created to back up servers to disk, then duplicate those jobs to tape.  But I still need the tape overwritten at the start of the duplicate.. have all the jobs for all servers duplicated to that tape.. then eject it at the end of all the jobs.  Is this not possible now without using external (powershell) commands and schedulers to erase the tape before the jobs all run and yet another to eject the tape when (hopefully) the last job has completed?

The servers vary from file servers/PDC's/BDC's/Domino Server/Terminal Servers.. so a group will not suffice here.

I'd appreciate any advice or help on this.  When set up properly, I can have any of my I.T. staff simply remove the tape in the morning.. and replace it with a new day's tape.. no interaction needed.  Now (apparently?) I have to erase the tape every day before the backups start.  Not efficient in my mind.

[CraigV]

Hi,

You can schedule an erase job no problems...getting the correct tapes, especially if they're in an autoloader or library means this is probably highly unlikely it will work.

A single-slot tape drive won't be a hassle at all. Just create an erase job and schedule it to run before your backup-to-tape does. You can even schedule the erase to run at the time the B2D job/s start.

For an autoloader/library you would then have to check out your media set properties and make sure they're overwritable.

Thanks!

[Jaydeep_S]

To add to what CraigV said, you could set the last job that runs to eject the media (Backup job properties)

[SoDakWill]

I don't see an option to schedule an erase job on my device (Quantum 1.. single tape drive).  Does this mean that my tape drive doesn't support this?  According to the help.. I should be able to right click the device, then schedule this.

Additionally, how do I know what the "last job" will be?  I set all my duplicate jobs to start at 3:00 AM each day... in the hopes that all the backup-to-disk jobs will be finished then.

Am I missing something?

Thanks for your comments/help by the way!

[Ken_Putnam]

You don't really need to do an erase job.  When an overwrite job starts it rewrites the tape header, which is functionally the same as a Quick Erase

You could get around the tape eject problem with a BEMCLI eject job run (from Window Task Scheduler) after you are reasonably sure that all the other jobs have ended or you could schedule one of the jobs with the eject option included to start at 0315.  It should queue up and run last

[SoDakWill]

Ken - I understand your point about setting the overwrite.. but I want all jobs on one tape.. so if the first job were set to start ... lets say 10 minutes before the others.. and that first job was set to overwrite.. would that job overwrite the tape and set it so that the other jobs (with "append" set) can write to the tape when they run?

I'd prefer not to have work-arounds.. and will probably just tell staff to eject the tape each day.

Thanks

[pkh]

The first job that writes to the tape must specify overwrite and then the subsequent job would specify append.  This will accomplish what you want to do.  For the last job, you can specify an eject stage to eject the tape.