Job is being splited into multiple tapes - even though "append to media" not marked

[gilkr]

hi, on backup exec 2010 R2 ver 13.0,

on the job's properties, on the "device and media" section, "overwrite media" is marked.
plus, there are a few tapes that are in an "overwritable" status,

still, for some reason, the job is being spreaded throughout 5 different tapes! why is that?? (DELL PowerVault LTO5-140)

i mean, even if it had no choice but to append, (wich it doesn't because it can overwrite tapes) it still could finish the appending with one tape.

please advice

thank you

gil

[AmolB]

If your jobs is spanning over multiple tapes then it will always look for an overwritable 

media, if there is appendable media BE will not pick it to continue with the backup process.

The job will remain in queued status and ultimately it will fail.

[gilkr]

All of the tapes are "overwritable" - we deliberately marked them as such so that what you described will not happen (jobs being failed)

in other words, it has many overwritable tapes to choose from.

[AmolB]

If the tapes are assigned to certain media set then move those overwritable tapes to the scratch media.

[pkh]

When it needs multiple tapes, BE will always overwrite the second and subsequent tapes.  It will only append to the first tape.

You can confirm that this behaviour by

1) check the joblog and see whether the amount of data that was backed up roughly fit the number of tapes used.

2) Create a restore job.  In the selection screen, click on the View by Media tab and click on one of the tapes used by the job (second or subsequent tape).  Check that it has only the data from the backup job and there is no old data present on the tape.