Library Insert Alert

[wopfather]

I have recently taken over the Backup Duties at my company due to the departure of a coworker, so i am new to Backup Exec. 

About My Environment:

I am running Backup Exec 12.5 with 2 Dell Tape Libraries. One is a Power Vault 136T with 6 LTO-2 Drives.  The other library is a ML6000 with 4 LTO 4 drives.  On a nightly basis we have 10 LTO Tapes mounted and 5 LTO 4 Tapes mounted for backups.  When a backup job is complete the Tape is moved into the "Backup Media" Media set.  (Not sure if this is a default media set or not) The Media set properties for Backup Media are; Over write Protection for 4 weeks and infinite - Allow Append.  On Average i have about 140 Backup jobs that occur ever night.

My Problem:

On more then a regular basis i come in to work in the morning and check backup exec for the progress of the previous nights backup only to find that there are one or more jobs still queued from the night before and alerts for each job to insert overwritable media.  When i look at my devices Usually all 10 of my LTO 2 tapes are filled, but my LTO 4 Tapes are not.  between all 5 tapes, there is generally 1.2-1.5 TB of space left and the tapes are in the Backup Media media set which is set to Allow-Append.  Why are my backup jobs not spooling to these available tapes.

[Ken_Putnam]

Are your libraries partitioned?  that is are they set up so that jobs only pull from specified slots?

About Appending, tho.  In BackupExec if a tape fills up and spans to another, that new tape MUST be an overwriteable tape.  You cannot start an overflow volume in the middle of an currently active tape

[Hywel_Mallett]

Do you actually have any overwritable media left? Are any of the online media shown in blue? As Ken says, it doesn't matter whether they're appendable or not.

[pkh]

You have 2 tape libraries and your various job are targeted to each of them.  BE will not be able to switch between the 2 libraries on the fly.  If Job A is targeted to write to the Power Vault, BE will not switch it to write to the ML6000 even if there are empty tapes in the ML6000.  This is not in the design of BE.

Your data has definitely out-grown the original backup scheme.  There are 2 ways you can solve this problem.

1) Put more tapes into the Power Vault, provided you have empty slots left.

2) Change some of your jobs to write to the ML6000, rather than the Power Vault.  To do this, go to the Device and Media section of the job properties.

[wopfather]

When i look in the morning, i do not have any Scratch Media left all the tapes have some amout of data left on them.  Thanks for the info guys, i think this is exactly what i needed.