Media Full - will not overwrite

[urwa]

I've been backing up and rotating 50 tapes. All of a sudden I'm getting an error message saying my tape from 12/2008 cannot backup because it's full and there is overwrite protection on it. I check my overwrite protection options and it's 3 weeks. What am I doing wrong? What do I need to be checking?

Thank you for your help.
Melissa

[CraigV]

Hi Urwa,

Make sure your media is associated with the correct media sets, and then the obvious check is to make sure the overwrite tab is not enabled physically on the tapes themselves.
You can always manually move the media you need to write too to the Scratch set by right-clicking it and following the prompt.

Laters!

[Ken_Putnam]

First check that the write protect tab on the cartridge itself is not in the "protected" position

Then -

Are your jobs all Append, or do you mix Append and Overwrite?  If you use Append, the OPP is reset each time the tape is closed

What is the OPP for the media set that the tape belongs to?  Is it possible that a different job wrote to that tape with a different media set  and OPP

[urwa]

I did check to make sure they tapes were not physically protected.

I'm thinking somehow the job was changed in 2008 because I got through 2007 tapes with no problem. What is an OPP and I can't remember what the job should look like now....

I did move one tape to scratch so that I can at least get a backup.

Thank you

[Ken_Putnam]

OPP is Overwrite Protection Period.  Assigned at the Media Set level. from the Devices Tab, right click the media set\Properties

 

[urwa]

ok, the OPP is set to Keep Data Infinetly - Do no overwrite. I'm looking through this list and it looks like all the tapes are in this set. The overwrite protection period is 3 weeks and the append period is infinite allow append.

Is there something I should change?

[urwa]

Could I be running out of storage space on the backup, could that be why it kicks the tape out. I'm using Ultrium 3 data cartridge with 400/800 GB. I my server data size is 467GB. Is the tapes 400 or 800 GB?

[urwa]

I just looked it up and 800gb is the compressed storage. Should I then compress my backup and if so how do i do that?

Thank you

[Colin_Weaver]

 Hi Urwa

The tape has a native capacity of 400GB and a compressed capacity of 800GB

What this means in practice is it depends on whether compression is working and whether or not what you backup can actually be compressed. There is no guarantee that you can reach 800GB.

First things to check are
1) the properties of the drive in the devices screen - does it show that compression is enabled on the drive?
2) the compression settings in the properties of the backup job?

Whether or not the data is already compressed is more difficult to calculate - however if you have enabled compression on your NTFS volumes then data cannot be compressed again. Also if the server contains lots of image, movie or zip files then these file types are (usually) compressed as well so can't be compressed again.

[Ken_Putnam]

I'm using Ultrium 3 data cartridge with 400/800 GB. I my server data size is 467GB. Is the tapes 400 or 800 GB?

if some data gets backed up and then this alert pops up, then yes, you could be filling the tapes up.  a 400/800 tape will bacup 400GB uncompressed and 800GB compressed at 2:1, which will almost never happen in the real world.  I normally use 1.2-1.3:1 as a rule of thumb.


ok, the OPP is set to Keep Data Infinetly - Do no overwrite. I'm looking through this list and it looks like all the tapes are in this set  The overwrite protection period is 3 weeks

Hmm.  this should not be happening  

from Tools\Options\Media Management   is the Global Overwrite setting FULL or PARTIAL and no NONE ?

[urwa]

The Global Overwrite setting is set to Partial

The NTFS volume is not set for compression. Should I set the backup job for software compression. When I look at the media and scroll over to see capacity, they are almost filled up.

[CraigV]

Take it down to None and see what this does. I normally leave mine as Partial, but remove the next tick box stating that the system must prompt before overwriting.