Force tapes to a pool

[John_Burg]

Hello everyone,

I have tapes with barcodes on it and want to split them for a Full Pool and a Differential Pool. When a tape comes back in a Scratch Pool then it must return to it's allocated Full or Differential Pool, but how can I realise this scenario?

Tape VVD001 = Full Pool

Tape VVD002 = Full Pool

Tape GGN003 = Differential Pool

Tape GGN004 = Differential Pool

Tape GGN005 = Differential Pool

Tape GGN006 = Differential Pool

The GGN003 tape may never be used for Full Pool and the VVD001 tape may never be used for the Differential Pool.

Is this possible?

[Larry_Fine · Accepted solution]

It is not easily possible as Backup Exec is not designed to do this.  BE operates on the theory of letting BE manage your media and any overwritable media is fair game for any job to use.

You MAY be able to achieve what you want by using some complicated bar code rules or partitioning your library, but both of those methods have potential drawbacks also.

[Colin_Weaver · Accepted solution]

You would have to partition the library to achieve this and then send the differential job to one partition and the full job to the other.

Bar code rules are only to ensure specific tapes are ONLY used in specific drives in order to handle you having a mixture of (for example) LTO-3 and LTO-5 drives with LTO-3 and 5 tapes (in one library) and making sure the correct tapes are used in the correct drives. They could not be used for pool management of the tapes.

Please note that media sets are for the control of when data can be appended or overwritten to, whilst they do have a small effect on when a tape might move from one set to another, at the end of the day media sets do not provide a barier to a tape moving to another media set, all they do is affect te exact order of choice (along with settings on the job and settings generally configured on the Backup Exec Server) of when a tape can be overwriteen and moved between sets.

[pkh]

If you do use partitions and do not set your OPP and AP correctly, then your job can fail due to a lack of suitable tape within the targeted partition.  BE will not pick a suitable tape from another partition.

[John_Burg]

Thank you Larry, Colin and pkh for your replies!

It seems it's not worth the trouble to configure this. Partitioning my Library is not an option unfortunalty so this means I need to change my workflow with the backups. It would have been nice to know that the tapes were always fulls or differentials.

[Colin_Weaver]

Just for info there are two types of partitioning, in our answers we are referring to where Backup Exec creates and controls the partitions, we are not referring to hardware partitioning done within the library itself (or the SAN linking the library to the server)