How to force 2 jobs to use different tapes

[Chris_Fort]

Hi all,

this is probably basic, but for the life of me I can't figure out how to get it done.

I'm using BE 2010 R3 with a HP Ultrium tape library. I have 2 jobs, a daily job and a nightly job. Both use tapes from the same media set. Both jobs are set to Append.

What I need to to is to force the daily job to always use a different tape than the nightly job. To this end I set up overwrite protection on the media set, and I set it to 10 hours. This is more than the time difference between the end of the nightly job and the start of the daily job (and vice versa). However I find that the daily job is still using tapes that were also used in the nightly job before.

I'm thinking it's not picking up the overwrite protection because both jobs are set to Append, rather than Overwrite. Would setting one of these jobs (or both) to Overwrite do the trick? I don't have any real means to test it myself, I can't take the risk of one job overwriting the other.

Any advice is really appreciated!

[Jaydeep_S]

Set the job to "Overwrite only" instead of append. Remember that everytime it runs, it will ask you fo a overwritable media.

Alternatively, you could set the MediaSet not to allow any append so that the tape can only be overwritten after the OP is finished an not appended to at all.

[SuperBrain]

Since you're using a tape library, you can make use of Partitions.

You can partition your tape library slots in any way you want and use them in the job properties to target your jobs.

Example:

Partition 1 = Slots 1, 2 and 3 (make sure these slots contain the tapes which you want your Daily job to use)

Partition 2 = Slots 4, 5 and 6 (make sure thses slots contain the tapes which you want your Nightly job to use)

Partition 3 = Slots 7, 8 and 9

Edit the Daily job and configure it to target Partition 1. So it will only pick tapes from either Slot 1, 2 or 3

Edit the Nightly job and configure it to target Partition 2. So it will only pick tapes from either Slot 4, 5 or 6.

For more information about creating, configuring, and targeting a backup job to a Robotic Library partition in Backup Exec see --> http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH27909

[Kiran_Bandi · Accepted solution]

I don't really understand why you are not looking at two different media sets instead of one. 

Create another media set and assign that with the job that is running night. 

[Chris_Fort]

thank you, i will try your suggestion about the Append.

[Chris_Fort]

Thank you for your reply.

The only potential issue I see with this is that I would need to know precisely how many tapes I need for each job. Of course I can calculate this, but with all tapes in one mediaset BE would do that automatically.

[Chris_Fort]

Same as I replied above. With two mediasets I would need to know beforehand how many tapes each job requires, and then assign tapes accordingly. Also, tapes are changed on a daily basis, so that means each day I would have to configure the tapes to attach to a specific mediaset.

Or am I missing something?

[Kiran_Bandi]

so that means each day I would have to configure the tapes to attach to a specific mediaset.

You no need to assign tapes manually to media sets. BE will do that for you... 

[Ken_Putnam]

I agree with Kiran

The easiest way to accomplish this is to use different media sets

If you REALLY don't want to do that for some reason, then the only other way is to make both jobs Overwrite, which means that you never fill any  of the tapes for either job (depending on the size of the job and amount of data on the backup of course)

[Chris_Fort]

I tried this, and indeed it works as intended. I thought I needed to specify the tapes, but BE does it automatically.  Thank you!