Media-Set Assignment / Write-Protection

[SNF]

Hi!

I am curious if someone can help me with following problem:

I have a single-tape-drive with backup-jobs configured that split into "daily" (mo-thu) and "weekly" (fr) jobs.

As I don't switch tapes myself, I want to make sure, that if someone enters a "wrong" tape (for example a "weekly tape" instead of a "daily tape"), the job does not run.

A classical mistake was the idea of creating two medie-sets (daily and weekly) and dragging the desired tapes into these sets, as in the job-config you may choose the target-media-set. This does not work of course, because whatever media-set you define in a job, the tape currently in the drive is beeing moved to that target-media-set.

Is there a way to solve this?

Best Regards,

Stefan

[CraigV]

Hi Stefan,

If your media sets are configured with the correct append/overwrite protection levels, you will have a situation where the tape ejects if the incorrect tape is inserted.

Another way around this is to label the tape within BE itself, and then label it physically. That way a user will know what tapes to put in on which days.

EDIT: Don't manually manage your media. Let BE decide which tapes to use, and when. The system will put the tapes into the correct media set.

Thanks!

[SNF]

Hi Craig!

Thanks for your answer.

Actually I have the tapes labeled within BE and physically and there is even a tape-calender which tells which tape to enter each day - still errors occur *sigh* ;)

I was afraid that I'll have to use overwrite-protection - now that I've manually assigned tapes to media-sets (which is the wrong way obviously), does that mean I'll have to drag all tapes out of the daily/weekly media-sets to e.g. temporary media, then define overwrite-periods in the daily/weekly sets and let BE move the tapes to the desired media-sets by each job? That would implicate that all tapes have to be entered correctly the first time a job runs - with my 40 tapes, from which some are only used once every few weeks, it seems rather impossible that this will work over month...

Best Regards,

Stefan

[RahulG]

You need to have your media set up properly 1st . I.e you can have a media set Daily with 3 days app and 4 days opp .(this way if you run the 1st dail job on monday  it can append to the tape for the next 3 days and after that it becomes overwrite protected., so if you inser that tape in the drive it you eject it and ask you to insert and overwriteable media .

Ffor the weekly media set you can have app = 0 and opp =6

So that media get overwritable on the same day of the week.

Check the setting you have in Tool--Option--media management

If you have the 'none' selected for the protection level then the media set which you have configured would be of no use.

[CraigV · Accepted solution]

I'd start with a new week firstly. Erase the tapes needed, and make sure your Append/OPP is correct in your media sets as well.

Put in a tape, and if a Daily job runs on a Monday, the system picks up an overwritable tape, and then adds that automatically to your Daily media set. Same for the second tape that it uses.

Once you're done with your Daily tapes, erase the tapes needed for your Weekly backup. It's a laborious couple of steps, but at least this way you're not going to make a mistake, and will allow BE to sort the tapes out so that it keeps track of them.