Media set not Showing Apend Time Left

[Paul_Cloak]

Hello,

We have been running BackupExec 8.6 onsite for three years with no problems. This morning I find a backup job waiting for a tape. The media set the job is using has 28 days overwrite protection and 7 days Append time Left set on the tape pool. When I left last might I have the current tape being used and one tape available.

This morning I find the current tape used and the next tape in line used, and the last job waiting for a tape. Reports show the available tape was only used for part of the job, (1Gb), but would not allow the next job to append to that tape which should have 74Gb free: tapes are DLTIV, hardware compression on.

Things I have found out.
1) If I take a tape from another media set and move it into the problem media set it shows its append time as available.
2) If I take a tape from the problem media set and move it into the another media set it shows its no append time as available.
3) setting append time to Infinite shows none in the problem media set.
4) If I go to the Device tab and look at the robot cartridge slots. the tapes in the problem media set SHOW their append time that is left.

Things that I have done Inventory, catalog, shutdown and restarted the BKUPEXEC services. reset the append times to no avail. Has any one seen this happen before.

Thank you in advance for your assistance.

[Ken_Putnam]

Do all jobs use the same media set?

Is the last job (the one waiting for a tape) Overwrite or Append, else Overwrite. What is the exact Alert that is pending?

[Paul_Cloak]

the media set in question is one of 5 created media set. This media set holds the weekly differential tape pool. The Differential jobs (Which there are 2 jobs, both job run nightly from Monday to Saturday) are assigned to this tape pool. These jobs are set as, Append to media, overwrite if no appendable media is availiable. There is 6 tapes in the pool. So as I am using one tape I have one with an expired overwrite time ready to usage and 4 tapes in protection.

as stated in the first posting. the current tape was being used by the fist job of the night. it rolled over to the available tape, completed successfully using only 1Gb of 75Gb and should have 190 hours of append time. when the second job started it could not append to this tape. Media reporting on the tape in question shows only 1.2Gb of data on the tape. but is not appendable.

The Alert message was the standard alert when there is no availiable tape to overwrite.

[Paul_Cloak]

The only solution that I could apply to this issue of the tape not being selected for overwirte or append to (even thou there is ample space left on the tape). Was to erase the next tape and have it waiting in the scratch pool.