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Library Insert Alert, but there are tapes there ready to go!!!!

Lesta_G
Level 6

hi all,

 

I just thought I would post here before logging a support call for this old chestnut, in-case someone knows of a recent solution

 

Problem #1

I have seen this in BE2010 R3 as well as BE2012

I have a daily media set that has a OPP of 28 days.

Bakups are daily, with the tapes being sent off site.

they come back in 28 days, ready to be overwritten. The appear as blue and overwriteable.

Life is happy

At some random time in the future, even with no changes to media set, Backup will consider the overwritable tapes to not be overwritable.

This then requires me to change the media set on the tapes to scratch media, for the tapes to be used again

BTW - I have this happening at two client sites one environment setup by me the other not (inherited).

 

Problem #2

In BE2012 if  a tape OPP is not expired and the job runs, the job, comes up with a Library Insert Alert.

Of course this is fine and logical.

But...

Say I have a job that starts at 6pm and for some reason the tape OPP expires at 7pm.

The job starts and waits for a tape as there are none available

At 7pm the tape becomes available as the OPP has expired

The job will still not use the tape

Accepting the Library Insert  Alert, the job will still not recognise the tape as overwritable.

I have to assign the tape to the Scratch Media Set and accept teh alert again for teh tape then to be used.

 

 

 

 

5 REPLIES 5

pkh
Moderator
Moderator
   VIP    Certified

Problem 1 - You got to ensure that the tapes are overwritable BEFORE the start of the job.

Problem 2 - Same as above, you got to ensure that the tapes are overwritable BEFORE the start of the job. Once the insert media alert is sent, the job will wait for a response.  It will not scan the library for any tapes that might be overwritable after the start of the job.  What you can do is to shorten the OPP by a day so that the tape is overwritable BEFORE the start of the job.

Lesta_G
Level 6

Hi Pkh,

Problem 1 - Tapes are returned and overwritable 3 days before they are needed/used by the tape drive. To be clear ,they are shown in BE as overwritable (in blue), the tape library is inventoried before any daily jobs are run (see attachment) but the job does not consider them overwritable for some reason. This is a bug

 

Problem 2 - I realise that may be the case. It should not need to scan the library, but it should check the media set to see if any tapes have become available. It does this with the scratch media set, so it should be easily able to do this with the defined media set in the job. This is more a design feature rather than a bug.

pkh
Moderator
Moderator
   VIP    Certified

1) How do you set your Overwrite Protection Level (Tools --> Options --> Data Management).  It should be set to either Partial or Full.  Are you using partitions?  BE will not fetch a tape from another partition

2) If you want you can make a case for this feature in the Ideas section.

Colin_Weaver
Moderator
Moderator
Employee Accredited Certified

Problem 1: that random point in time would not be February would it? as you may need to set 27 days to cover for February.

 

Also if any jobs take longer than 24 hours from their set start time to finish writing to the tape this will affect things as well.

 

Problem 2: As kind of hinted, If BE seararches for an overwriteable tape and can't find any at the time it will not re-check the same tape every hour to see if it is now overwritable it discounts the tape from being available and expects to be provided with a different one. PKH suggestion of filling out an Idea via the Create contant menu in these forums is a good oen as it is how we receive enhancement requests from customers.

Lesta_G
Level 6

Problem 1: No not Feb. :) There can be 4 or more tapes in the library shown as blue and overwriteable for that media set. The OPP is set to 4 weeks (28 days)  and the tapes actually return from the vault after a month. So there are a number of overwriteable tapes available to the job, yet it turns it's nose up and only wants scratch tapes. :(

I'll log a support call

 

Problem 2: Yeah I will add it as an idea. Once the Library Insert alert is raised, BE is kind enough to check the scratch media, so logically, (to me anyhow) I think it should also check for overwriteable media in the media set again as well :)