Yet again Backup Exec has written to tapes I didnt tell it to write to. This has caused me to re-visit pkh's article here in order to try and align our backup regime to the software someone, at some point, thought it would be a good idea to use. This has prompted me to ask a couple of questions.
Firstly, let me make my position clear; Its my opinion, that a tool should help people in the way that they work. When people are forced to alter their working practises in order to accomodate a tool, people soon either abandon that tool, or find another way to work around it. Its something that has plagued so much software so far. Also - when a piece of software allows me to create media sets, and then asks me when creating a backup job which media set to use, then it should use said media set! If a tape is physically labelled as one thing, and backupexec uses it as something else, then the principle of 'a backup on the wrong tape is better than no backup at all' is moot - becuase if you can't identify a tape with your eyes when you come to do a restore, then you cant find the backup to restore, and being able to restore a backup is the whole point in taking a backup.
So - the legacy system I've inherited has Daily tapes (Mon to Fri, & Sun), within a Daily media set. Weekly tapes (Wk 1 to 5), within a weekly set. Monthly tapes (Mth 1 to 11) in a Monthly set, and Yearly Tapes, in a Yearly set. Out tape library has room for 28 tapes. Tape backup is the responsibility or my role, but the tapes are changed by a team of technicians. Our tapes go off site with a third party.
I'd like to move to a system where we have a pool of tapes, labelled say 1 to 50 (or however we'd need in total), and the llibrary is kept fully loaded. In theory, this should be simpler. Backup Exec chooses tapes which it wants from the pool, writes the data to the tapes, and we remove any tapes that its used, record whether they're for a Daily, Weekly, Monthly or Yearly backup, and put them off site. This is what I understand how pkh feels it should be done in the article - but Im unable to find a way in Backup Exec to create a report which simply outputs which tapes have been used. I either have to go into the Devices tab and check the date fields, or go into each individual job and see what tape has been used each time. Both are a long, tedious process I cannot trust to the technicians, and quite frankly I have better things to do than run around after stubborn software. So - how would you suggest I create such a notification?
