Job not spanning tapes in Media Set

[jlawre23]

I am using BackupExec 12.5 ver 2213 and having problems with the Job asking for Scatch media.  Why would the job not use free/appendable tapes that are in it's media set?  I am having to take a tape from the media set and move it to scratch media for the job to continue.  I have the tapes in that media set setup to "Infinite - Allow Append".  What am I missing or doing wrong here?

Thanks in advance.

[Ken_Putnam]

Why would the job not use free/appendable tapes that are in it's media set?

BE should be doing this already

Are your jobs Overwrite or Append? 

If they are append, BackupExec will only append to the first volume fo a job.  If it fills the tape, then it will only continue on a Scratch/Overwriteable tape

[netsec]

We also having same problem

[Hemant_Jain]

Hi
There are two places where you would adjust the settings to get this working.
1. Set the Overwrite protection period and append period on the media set to ensure that the tape is appendable and overwritable, depending on the type of job you have fired. If in the backup job, you have set the job to overwrite, it would look for overwritable media, else it would look for appendable media and if it doesn't get appendable, it may switch to scratch media or recyclable media.
2. You need to verify whether the order of selection, is scratch first or recyclable first by going to tools-> options-> Media management. So, when an overwrite job runs, it would have two choices, a recylable(one whose OPP has expired) and scratch. Choice will depend on the setting you do here.
Understanding of these settings will help you design a backup strategy so that you dont get into this kind of trouble and also you dont lose data because of accidental overwrites.

For detailed information on Media management, consider following document:
http://support.veritas.com/docs/192265

Please mark it a solution, if that helps.
Thanks

[Colin_Weaver]

One other point - whenever a job appends to a tape and then fills it, when it asks for another tape to continue the backup - that 2nd tape has to be overwritten - Backup Exec will therefore not look for any media that is ONLY appendable when a job spans to a second tape.

Which tape is used for the span to an overwrite is then controlled by the recyclable or scratch setting that Hemant Jain refered to in teh earlier resply.