How do I keep different backup jobs from robbing tapes out of other media sets

[Bhouck]

I have been having an issue with one of my GFS jobs since the monthly backup ran. I generally keep a set of weekly, several sets of daily and one blank set of overwriteable scratch media in my library. Last month when the monthly tapes ran, the job did not use the scratch media as expected. Instead, the tape locations were marked as empty and the monthly job used a combination of daily tapes and weekly tapes to perform the backup. The weekly then ran on schedule, short of tapes from that media set, and it too took tapes from my daily media instead of scratch.

All the tapes used were marked as ovewrwritable as I do overwrite the tapes as opposed to appending them so at least that is an expected behavior (as in they did not use tapes that were not marked as overwriteable). Perhaps I forgot to scan those tapes cells when I added the scratch tape, although the scratch tapes are generally in the library for a month at a time so I find it hard that I overlooked this for 30 days. I have seen this behavior before but it was generally limited to a single backup session and everything corrected itself by the next backup run but this time, the problems continue to occur. I am coming up on a weekly backup run and I don't want to come in on Monday and see that the weekend run overwrote my daily tapes.

My question is why does the robbing behavior persist? I would prefer that the jobs contune to use tapes from their own media sets and use the scratch tapes when needed but lately the jobs appear to treat all overwriteable tapes as scratch. We are using BE2012 and the software is currently up-to-date using LiveUpdate. Any advice on how to set this would be helpful. Thanks.

[Steve_4]

Because the user does not want all backups on one tape.....the title even indicates that he wants the jobs seperated and not using the same tape/s

[Bhouck]

OK, seeing as how there is a flurry of new posts regarding this issue, I am back to comment. I appreciate everyone's help on this and it is interesting to see that I am not the only one annoyed this "default" behavior. I would initially contradict the comment that media sets exist only to manage the timing of tape reuse. Why would I need a media set to manage that? At it's core, media sets exist to organize the tape media themselves.

SO, I basically had given up on actually get the media sets to work properly. It is only an issue when I run my monthly tapes and while it is extremely annoying, I can deal with a once-a-month bug. What I do now before my monthly backup occurs is to put all overwriteable media into "Do not overwrite" and then return it back to the proper media set afterwards. This only works when I can get back to the software in time to do this. I could not last month so I was forced to leave both my overwriteable monthly tape set as well as the next weekly tape set, in addition to my dailies all online and ready to go. You can see what occured:

THE end of last month was a Monday so I needed to keep everything ready to write. Here's what happened: Two of my monthly tapes were used. The intention was that the four tape set would be completed with two scratch media. But the backup grabbed the two oldest tapes from the daily media set instead. That next daily set finished its operation by grabbing the first two weekly tapes from the next weekly set of tapes. All the rest of the daily tapes were used in sequetial order and remained within their set. When the weekly set started, it FINALLY used the two scratch media that were intended to be used for the June monthly. YAY. It all makes sense (not). So I just reprinted all my labels.

TO once again describe my media, I have five weekly media sets that I manually rotate out of the library. I have four dailies which usually three are in the library, one is offsite. Of these three sets, generally one or more may be overwritable by the end of the week. I also keep my next overwriteable monthly tape set in the library as well. I do rotate out my current backed up media on a daily basis so that the older sets are ready to start. My sets are four tapes each. I do a full backup, not incremental or differential -- just easier for me to deal with restores when needed.

AND yes, I have confirmed all my settings for each tape operation. They are all the same. I would also have a similar problem if I did not regularly rotate my tapes. Eventually, each operation would cannibalize the others for enough tapes to complete until all were marked as "Not Appendable". I don't really need any responses to my post. It is clear that this behavior is either programmed to behave this way or is simply not high enough on Symantec's priority list to fix and/or create options to keep the operations within their media set boundaries.