How to recycle entire media set?

[Marc_Pelletier]

Hello,

I am running 10.0 with a robotic library on win2ksbs. I have the agents for sql server and Exchange. For reasons I can no longer recall, I had to create a separate policy for backing up Exchange and SQL Server separately from my main backup. The end result is 2 jobs daily; one doing everything but, and one doing Exch & SQL Server. They go to the same media set. I rotate through 4 media sets on a weekly basis.

Every Friday I have the main backup doing an overwrite, but not the exchange as I was afraid it would wipe out the just finished job. All of the other jobs do an overwrite or terminate. But the main friday backup seems to only recycle the tapes that it needs, not the media set. Because of this I have to manually erase tapes from time to time. I want all the tapes in the media set to be erased on Friday.

I suspect this has something to do with overwrite protection.

I was going to schedule a quick erase for each tape on the friday, but if my memory serves that removes it from the media set, which would not be good. Is there another solution?

Thanks

Marc Pelletier
Goldak Airborne Surveys

[tejashree_Bhate]

Hello,

Please refer to the technotes given below which explains the OPP and the APP

(title) The basics of Advanced Device and Media Management for Backup Exec for Windows Servers

http://support.veritas.com/docs/192265

(title) An explanation of the "Overwrite Protection Period" and the "Append Period"

http://support.veritas.com/docs/237374

Let us know in case of further queries

Note:- if we do not receive your reply within two business days, this post would be assumed answered and archived.

[Marc_Pelletier]

Thanks for the references. I think I have it sorted out now.

It goes like this.
The Friday backup of the main dataset is an overwrite full backup
The Friday backup of the Exchange dataset is an append/overwrite full backup
Every other backup is incremental append/overwrite

Since the tape rotation is 4 weeks I've set the overwrite protection to 2 weeks. That way a tape that is allocated on the last day of the cycle will still be available on the first day of the next cycle

I've set the append period to 1 week. So that the tape will get overwritten the first time it is used in any cycle.

I've also set the media overwrite options in the application defaults to overwrite the targeted media set before scratch media. This should fix a problem I had before where tapes sometimes miraculously changed media set on me. I frequently have 2 media sets in the loader.

Did I get it right?

Thanks

Marc