Media Pool and Scheduling Problems

[Walter_S__Hutsk]

Hi, I'm running Backup Exec 10 with Service Pack 5 on an Exabyte VXA-2 packet loader 10 tape carousel. 

I'm having a lot of trouble with the scheduled backup jobs taking the correct tape from the media pool I want it too.  I have a differential backup job running everyday of the week (Monday through Thursday) and I do a full backup on Friday nights.  The Monday through Thursday backups are all differential backups and they each only use one tape to complete.  Each tape is in it's own media pool for each day of the week. 

My weekend backup is a little different and uses up two tapes, so I have two tapes placed in the weekend media pool I have created.

Backup Exec seems to be misreading the tapes in the drives or something.   For example this morning when I came to work to check on the tapes it was reading the tape in Monday's media pool as a cleaning tape (which it's not) and it took Wednesday's tape out of it's media pool to use for Monday's backup. 

I rotate out my two weekend tapes every week with two new tapes and run an inventory job and a lot of the time this will mess up my media pools and take takes tapes offline in certain media pools and incorrectly list other tapes as cleaning tapes.

Stuff like this happens all the time and I had a technician on a previous post tell me to remove the media overwrite protect for all the backup jobs and it should fix the problem and it didn't. 

Is there anything else I can try and do to keep the tapes I want in the media pools I want without Backup Exec importing them from other media pools?

I also have another question about scheduling backups.  On months when there aren't 5 weekends and I have a Weekend 5 backup job scheduled to run, it seems that both Weekend 4 and 5 will run on the same date since there is no Weekend 5.  An example would be this May.  It only has 4 weekends and it looks like Weekend 5, which is scheduled to run on the last weekend of the month, and Weekend 4, are going to run on the same date.  What is the best way to prevent this from happening?

Thanks,

Walter Hutsky

[Ken_Putnam]

I'm having a lot of trouble with the scheduled backup jobs taking the correct tape from the media pool I want it too.

You are not alone in this.  there are several things you can do to try to get BackupExec to grab the tape you want it to, but the only way to guarantee it is to partition the loader, then point your jobs at the appropriate partition

See

http://support.veritas.com/docs/262055

http://support.veritas.com/docs/206843

http://support.veritas.com/docs/241773

Every time that you change tapes in the loader you need to inventory the slots that have changed

As far as scheduling, do you do anything special on the last Friday, or is it just one more Friday?

[Robert_Schmidt_]

"I also have another question about scheduling backups.  On months when there aren't 5 weekends and I have a Weekend 5 backup job scheduled to run, ........  What is the best way to prevent this from happening?"

That will depend on your particular business needs - for example, are you financial based and absolutely require a backup on the last day of the month, etc.

For my situation, I long long ago gave away the idea of "months" and based my backup cycle on 13 x 4-week periods. The last weekend in each 4-week cycle is deemed the "retain" (as opposed to 'monthly') and put aside - has its own media pool to prevent overwrite and make it easy to identify. Once it's set up and you're into it, you very quickly divorce your backup pattern from the calendar - i've used that strategy for more than 7 years.

Message Edited by Robert Schmidt on 05-02-200710:18 AM